Aurél Török, Ponori Thewrewk

* Bratislava, February 13, 1842 – † Geneva, September 1, 1912 / physician, anthropologist, university professor, corresponding member of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences (1892) ; ; son of József Ponori Thewrewk, younger brother of Emil Ponori Thewrewk and Árpád Ponori Thewrewk, grandfather of astronomer Aurél Ponori Thewrewk (May 2, 1921 – October 8, 2014). He earned his medical degree in Vienna. In 1867–1869, he was an assistant professor at the Department of Physiology at the University of Pest, and from 1869, he was a professor of theoretical medicine at the Academy of Medicine and Surgery in Cluj-Napoca, and after its transformation into a university, he was a university professor (physiology) there between 1872–1881. In 1880, he spent a few months at the Paris institute of the eminent French anthropologist Pierre-Paul Broca (1828–1880). Between 1881 and 1912, he was a professor at the anthropology department established at the Faculty of Humanities of the University of Budapest, and the founder of the Budapest Anthropological Institute and Museum. His name is well known abroad due to his large number of scientific papers published in foreign languages (mainly German) and the craniometer he designed. He was an early supporter of Darwinism. He was the founder of scientific anthropology in Hungary. In 1883, he took over the skull collection offered by the Hungarian National Museum. In the same year, he asked the Minister of Religion and Public Education to order the reporting of the bones found during the excavations to the Anthropological Museum. The Metropolitan Council authorized this in the same year. During his scientific career, he performed anthropological measurements on the skeletons of historical figures (Ferenc Rákóczi II, Imre Thököly, Béla III) excavated, and dealt with the anthropological characteristics of the Hungarians who conquered the country. He was one of the first to apply biometric methods and probability calculations in anthropology. In 1889, he launched a series of studies (final length approx. 700 pages) in the columns of the Archiv für Anthropologie, which dealt with a single año skull (the specimen came from Count Béla Széchenyi's East Asian expedition). He died before the opening day of the Geneva Anthropological Congress. ; ; His main works: ; The Termination of Musculoskeletal Nerves, 1866, Papers from the Institute of Life and Tissue Biology in Kolozsvár, 1876, ; Anthropological pamphlets, 1881, ; Über ein Universal-Kraniometer, 1888, ; Data for the excavation of the remains of the Árpáds, 1894, ; Report on the remains of the Hungarian King Béla III and his wife, 1894, ; Data for the transformation of the skulls of anthropoids, 1894, ; On the basic idea of Lombroso's criminal anthropology, 1906.