Vaclav Trnka from Krovice (1739-1791, in Latin: Wenzel Trnka Krzowitz) was a remarkable
physician whose life serves as an example in the history of medicine by connecting
major capital cities of Central Europe. In view of current geographical layout, he
was born and brought up in the Czech Republic, graduated from University of Vienna
in Austria, and was appointed Professor of the Anatomy at the newly established Faculty
of Medicine of University of Nagyszombat, presently Trnava in Slovak Republic. When
the University moved to Buda and later to Pest (today Budapest, Hungary), he was the
first educator to introduce anatomy as a medical subject to be taught in a Hungarian
medical school. He also was elected the Dean of Faculty of Medicine three times and
in 1786-1787 he acted as Rector of then the Royal University of Pest. During his life,
he published twenty-seven monographs dealing with different areas of clinical medicine,
such as malaria (intermittent fever), diabetes, and rickets. Based on these monographs
we can proclaim that Vaclav Trnka was a co-founder of modern infectology, diabetology
and ophthalmology in Central Europe. Nowadays, artificial intelligence and bioinformatics
are inseparable parts of modern health care system which help the transformation of
big data into valuable knowledge. In the 18th century, Professor Trnka owned more
than 3,000 scientific books and had natural, innate intelligence and wisdom which
made him a real "medical polymath". As a musician, Trnka also composed sixty-one canons,
two of them long wrongly considered as Mozart's work. Despite the fact that Trnka
is considered to be the founder of Hungarian anatomy education and a major medical
figure of the eighteenth century Central Europe, no internationally acclaimed biographical
record of his life or work has so far been published in English. Therefore, we would
like to reintroduce Vaclav Trnka both as an anatomist and medical polymath, and to
give an overview of the early days of anatomy teaching in present-day Slovakia and
Hungary (Fig. 1, Ref. 27).
