Janos Dercsényi, Weiss

* Szepesszombat, May 16, 1755.177 – † Munkács, June 30, 1837. / physician, entrepreneur, winemaker, county judge ; ; His father, János Weiss, was a Lutheran minister in his hometown. The family was granted nobility by Leopold I in 1687. Dercsényi began his school education in Levoča and continued in Bratislava. He studied medicine at the University of Vienna and obtained his doctorate in medicine there in 1780. After that, he served as the chief physician of Zemplén County for a few years, but resigned from his office and then farmed on his estates around Munkács. He was also interested in mineralogy, and founded a company to extract the alum found on his estates and produce alum. In 1792, he received an estate in Dercsény, Bereg County, as a royal gift and from then on he used the surname Dercsényi. ; In 1785, he married Júlia Kazinczy, the sister of Ferenc Kazinczy, and thus came into close contact with the distinguished poet and language reformer. In 1814, he became a royal councilor, and as a member of the 1825–1827 parliament, he was elected to the committee that drafted the Hungarian Mining Law Code. In addition to his official duties, he also published regularly. His articles on various topics appeared in Hungarian (Scientific Collection, Scientific Archive) and foreign journals (on artesian wells, minerals from the Carpathian Basin, comparisons of Hungarian and foreign wines, meteorological phenomena, earthquakes, etc.). ; In addition to mineralogy, he was much concerned with the cultivation of grapes and winemaking in Tokaj-Hegyalja. He studied the geology of Tokaj-Hegyalja and the effect of mineral conditions on winemaking. He wrote the first detailed summary of Tokaj wines in German. This work was later published in Hungarian in Košice, translated by Gábor Fülöp Őri. Of his two sons, the elder, Pál Dercsényi (Sátoraljaújhely, April 9, 1797 – December 18, 1843) was a landowner and wrote articles on economic topics in Társalkodó and other newspapers. The younger son, János Lajos Dercsényi (Tokaj, October 6, 1802 – Vienna, August 29, 1863) was an imperial and royal court councilor, and his thesis entitled On the Transformation Plan of the Hungarian Religious Commissions was awarded a hundred gold coins by the Hungarian Academy of Sciences in 1847. He also wrote articles on political science, economics, and education. The most detailed biography of János Dercsényi was written by medical historian László Kiss (Palást) (Kazinczy's brother-in-law, chief physician of Zemplén: János Dercsényi, 2009). ; ; His main works: ; Pyretologiae practicae tentamen, 1780, ; Über Tokay ’s Weinbau, dessen Fechsung und Gährung. Mit geognostischen Beilagen, 1796 (in Hungarian: A tokaji bornak törvényörű, szürésörű és vorsáról, Kassa, 1799).