Augustine Christian, ab Hortis

* Neisse, 6 December 1598 – † Kakaslomnic, 21 August 1650 / physician, naturalist ; ; He received his medical degree in Basel in 1620 and practiced briefly in Switzerland and then in Silesia. In 1622 he became the city physician in Keszthely, but was widowed the following year and moved to Kakaslomnic with his second wife in 1626. He soon became the personal physician of Emperor Ferdinand II in Vienna. In 1631 he founded a botanical garden in Vienna, and the emperor rewarded him with the title of Hungarian nobleman and the first name ab Hortis. When the emperor died in 1637, Augustini returned to Kakaslomnic, although he still held the title of royal physician under Ferdinand III. In addition to medicine, he also studied botany and minerals, and often went on trips to the Tatra Mountains. In 1640, he began producing the so-called Hungarian balsam from dwarf pine oil, and then the Carpathian balsam from juniper oil. For a long time, they were considered a kind of miracle cure, and he himself was happy to write about them as such. We know that he also wrote a book about these preparations entitled De Balsamo Hungariae Carpathico, but it was never published in print and his manuscript was lost decades later. His work on Hungarian gemstones, De gemmis Hungariae, suffered a similar fate. There are assumptions that the works in question were published in German, or that the manuscripts are hidden somewhere in Poland, but this can neither be confirmed nor denied. At the same time, it is a fact that several people could have read the manuscript on balsams, since it is quoted verbatim.