He was the first to synthesise uric acid from glycine in 1882.[1][2] He also noticed that aminoacids were building blocks of proteins. Horbachevsky worked in Austria, Czechoslovakia, Hungary and Ukraine. It was as though the Dual Monarchy was responding to the Spanish flu when, on 30 July 1918, Imperial Councillor Ivan Horbachevsky was appointed by imperial decree the empire’s first health minister.[3]