Vida Tivadar

* Ipolyság, February 6, 1922 – † Budapest, October 13, 2012 / Roman Catholic. parish priest, medical historian ; ; When he was three years old, his family moved from Ipolyság to Bratislava, his younger brother Zoltán, who later became a prominent sculptor and church artist himself as a student of the sculptor Zsigmond Kisfaludy Stróbl, was born in Bratislava. Tivadar Vida completed his school studies in Bratislava, graduating from the Bratislava Real Gymnasium in 1938. He began his theological studies in Košice, then completed them at the Bratislava Seminary in 1945 and was ordained a priest on March 31, 1945, a few days before the Russian occupation of the Slovak capital. He began his priestly career in Bratislava Bishopric and served as a chaplain there until the end of 1946. At that time he was transferred to Szakolcá, and after the communist takeover (February 25, 1948) he was transferred every two to three years to different parishes (Nyitrasárfő, Bozók, Garamkövesd, Sáró). In 1960, at his last place of service, on the orders of the Ministry of the Interior, his church superiors suspended him from his priestly position and even revoked his pastoral license because he administered the sacraments to people who were not even allowed to visit the church. A small village in the Murány Valley, Lice, was designated as a place of forced residence for him, where he had to earn his living as a woodcutter and forest worker. ; His mother and Zoltán's younger brother were already living in Hungary at that time, so the Czechoslovak authorities allowed him to resettle in Hungary in 1962 under the pretext of "family reunification". Since his official documents also included the ban, he could not get a parish there either. In Budapest, he found a job as a mailman at the National Institute of Rheumatology and Physiotherapy (ORFI, formerly the Hospital of the Merciful). The head of the Institute, Professor Károly Farkas, noticed Tivadar Vida's proficiency in languages (in addition to Hungarian, Slovak, and German, he also knew Latin, Greek, and French) and recommended him to Ákos Palla, the then director of the Semmelweis Medical History Library located opposite the ORFI. There they were in the middle of a major undertaking: they were translating from Latin into Hungarian the four-volume work of the physician and medical historian István Weszprémi (1723–1799), the Succincta Medicorum Hungariae et Transilvaniae Biographia (Brief Biography of the Doctors of Hungary and Transylvania), which included biographies of Hungarian doctors. Aladár Kővári, who translated the first three volumes, was unable to continue the work due to his illness, so the 4th (and last), 1111-page (!) part was translated into Hungarian by Tivadar Vida in 1970. Later, he also translated the work of the distinguished 16th century humanist, György Wernher (Eperjes), De admirandis Hungariae aquis (On the Wonderful Waters of Hungary). However, Tivadar Vida did very important work not only as a translator, but also as a caretaker and publisher of manuscript legacies and correspondence. He published, for example, the collected manuscripts of Ignác Semmelweis. R. Viola Harkó and the first Prime Minister of Hungary after the change of regime, József Antall (1932–1993), who was active as a medical historian at the time, also contributed to this work. This same trio also translated János Dániel Perliczi's Latin draft, in which he proposed to Maria Theresa to start medical education in Hungary. Tivadar Vida not only translated documents of importance to medical history, but also published studies, and in 1970 he even earned a doctorate in church history from the University of Theology in Budapest. In 1975, he was able to practice his pastoral profession again and served at the Marian Hermitage until 2005. But he did not stop translating: he translated the speeches of Pelbárt Temesvári into Hungarian. He was awarded the Fraknói Prize in 2007 for his microphilological research on the Pray Codex. He enjoyed excellent health even in his old age: he regularly swam and went on hiking trips. His death was caused by a car accident.