János Balassa

János Balassa (1815 to 1868) was a Hungarian surgeon and university professor, one of the leading figures of the Hungarian medical community of his time. He held the chair of surgery at the University of Pest from 1843 and became internationally recognised as an authority on plastic surgery. The article credits him as a pioneer of cardiac resuscitation who carried out the first reported case of external heart massage. After the failed Hungarian Revolution of 1848, in which Hungary sought independence from the Austrian Empire, the Habsburg authorities removed him from his professorship for a time and imprisoned him. He was also a colleague and house doctor to Ignaz Semmelweis, and sat on the medical commission that referred Semmelweis to a mental institution, together with János Bókai and a physician named Wagner. His place in the record is therefore both as a surgical innovator and as a witness to the dispute surrounding the discoverer of hand disinfection.