My principal research interests lie in the fields of Social and cultural History of Medicine. In my current project I research the relation between the Center (Vienna) and periphery (Hungary and Tranylvania), in a crucial period in the history of the Habsburg Monarchy (1770–1830), aiming to see the way in which Enlightenment thought shaped science and medicine in Central and South-Eastern Europe.
The main questions I try to answer are:
1. What was the role of Enlightenment thought in shaping medicine in the Habsburg Monarchy?
2. How and why did University of Vienna come to be a formative factor, a centre for producing knowledge?
3. How can medical Enlightenment be defined in the specific setting of a highly diverse society governed by an increasingly centralising administration?
4. What was the role of the Habsburg court in this enterprise?
Medical knowledge reached the provinces from Vienna via education, books, and circulation of medical men. Thus, Vienna became a center of producing knowledge in the last part of the 18th century.
The study of regional medical cultures, more specifically the Transylvanian case study, points out the production and circulation of knowledge between the provinces and Vienna. The dynamics of this circulation reveals the fact that problems such as health, diseases, public health, hygiene and dietetics were in the same way patriotic, medical and cultural issues in the complex political, ethnical and confessional milieu of the Habsburg Monarchy.