Opatija – European „fair grounds“ of physicians’ and pharmacists’ ideas and patents at the end of the 19th and the beginning of the 20th centuries

Abstract

By locating the events into the elite winter-, seaside-, climatic, and „Terrain-Curort“ of Austrian- Hungarian Monarchy, the present paper offers the overview of a few innovations of physicians and pharmacists who worked in Opatija or were related to it in various ways, temporary or permanently, at the end of the 19th or at the beginning of the 20th century. The major attention has been devoted to the Jew Leo Sternbach, the inventor of Vallium, born in Opatija, and to the Hungarian Géza Fodor, the promoter of curing with his own preparation named Marina. Mentioned are also the pharmacists Béla Erényi (Diana-Franzbranntwein) and Mihael Sternbach (Ovol, Laurol), as well as the domestic physician Ante Grgurine who introduced the diagnostic method of hypselophonia. In conclusion, Opatija at the turn of the 19th to the 20th centuries has been presented as a destination of an extraordinary development dynamics, especially within the economic, infrastructural, and social segment, while the openness to new ideas and practice of physicians and pharmacists indicate the level of intellectual multicultural „globalization“ that many other towns will not reach for a long time.