Florica Bagdasar
Florica Bagdasar was a Romanian neuropsychiatrist, who was the first woman minister in Romania at the Ministry of Health between 1946 and 1948.
Biographical data and education
Florica Bagdasar came from an Aromanian family. Her father was - bridge and road engineer, as well as a high school math teacher. Her mother was Anastasia Ciumetti, born Papahagi ; her brother, Pericle Papahagi, was an acknowledged authority on the life and languages of the Romance-speaking peoples from south of the Danube, the Aromanians. Florica started high school at the Pompilian private boarding school, but because of World War I, she had to continue high school in Moldavia, in the town of Roman, where the family had taken refuge.She graduated from "Roman Vodă" high school in 1920. She was admitted to the School of Medicine in Bucharest, from which she graduated in 1925. After years of internships and externships at the Bucharest hospital "Așezămintele Brâncovenești", she obtained a doctoral degree in medicine and surgery and the right to practice medicine. In 1927 she married . The newly-weds Bagdasars went to Boston, Massachusetts to pursue professional training; Florica to attend Public Health courses at Harvard University, Dumitru to acquire knowledge about the new neurosurgery techniques from the pioneer of modern brain surgery, Dr. Harvey Cushing, at his Clinic, Peter Bent Brigham. While in Boston, Florica Bagdasar received a Rockefeller Scholarship. Upon their return to their country in 1929, the couple spent a few years in Jimbolia and Cernăuţi, after which they arrived in Bucharest where they settled and where remained until the end of their lives. In 1935, Dr. Bagdasar obtained, through a competition exam, the right to open the first neurosurgery clinic in Bucharest. All that time, from his return from Boston in 1929 until 1935, modern surgery technology did not exist in Romania and he was operating on the brain under primitive, improvised conditions. Until he was able to create his own neurosurgery team, it was his wife, Dr. Florica Bagdasar, who was the only one constantly at his side in the operating room, assisting and encouraging him.
Professional activity
After passing through the whole sequence of necessary exams and competitions, Florica Bagdasar obtained the title of “Primary Psychiatrist”, with the specialty of mental hygiene. She dedicated herself to the field of neuropsychiatric and educational pediatric care. Florica Bagdasar and her collaborator, Florica Nicolescu, have successfully developed and experienced in numerous primary schools their own alphabet textbook and their own arithmetic manual, both based on the global grouping idea and simplified vertical writing These teaching materials were meant to attract children's interest and make them learn with pleasure, in a rather play-like education process. In 1946 Dr. Florica Bagdasar created the Center for Mental Hygiene in Bucharest, on Str. Vasile Lascăr Nr. 14, whose mission was to treat children with mental deficiencies and behavioral disorders. This center was designed by Florica Bagdasar following the most modern scientific methods used in the US. As director of this institution, Florica Bagdasar recruited and organized an exemplary team of experts to deal with children's problems, psychologists, pedagogues, speech therapists, and kinesiotherapists. Florica Bagdasar served as director of the Center for Mental Hygiene until January 1953.In 1946, after the death of her husband, who was at that time the Minister of Health in the Petru Groza government, Florica Bagdasar was asked to become the Minister of Health, as her husband's successor. She occupied this position from 26 September 1946 to 28 August 1948.
Dr. Florica Bagdasar became the first woman to lead a ministerial cabinet in Romania's government. In the years immediately following World War II, both Bagdasar ministers of health, her husband first, then she, faced serious crises that urgently needed to be resolved: sanitary networks decimated by the war, poverty, terrible famine – especially in the region of Moldovia where drought and fierce winter had ravaged — and which in turn contributed to the devastating epidemics of endemic typhus in Moldovia and malaria in Dobruja. , the well-known Romanian psychiatrist, and epidemiologist Mihai Ciucă worked directly with the Minister of Health - Florica Bagdasar - in campaigns to combat these epidemics.
In 1949, Florica Bagdasar was appointed associate professor at the Medical-Pharmaceutical Institute, where she introduced the specialty of pediatric neuropsychiatry. She became a promoter of infantile neuropsychiatry, both theoretical and practical, creating valuable specialists.
In October 1957 she was appointed Vice-President of the Romanian Red Cross. She held this position for several years.
Political activity
Florica Bagdasar walked in the footsteps of her husband, Dumitru Bagdasar, who had a left political position since his youth. Thus, after King Michael's Coup of August 23, 1944, Florica Bagdasar became a member of the Romanian Communist Party. From 1944 to 1948 she worked in various mass organizations, such as Patriotic Defense, the Union of Patriots, and in the Union of Democratic Women in Romania. Between 1946–1951, she was a member of the Great National Assembly as Tulcea County Deputy. In August–September 1946, she was the only woman in the official delegation of Romania to the Paris Peace Conference. From Paris, she went on an official mission to Stockholm to seek help from Sweden for war-torn Romania. After returning to her country on September 26, 1946, she was appointed Minister of Health and held this position until August 28, 1948. Campania de denigrare, Revista Grupului pentru Dialog Social, December 21, 2010. In 1948 she was decorated with the Order of the Star of the Romanian People's Republic.Dismissal and rehabilitation
The fact that in 1949 she was appointed as associate professor at the Bucharest Medical and Pharmaceutical Institute and in October 1957 the Vice-President of the Red Cross organization in Romania could suggest that Florica Bagdasar had a career of uninterrupted ascension. However, between 1953–1956 she fell in disgrace, only a step away from being executed.The campaign against Florica Bagdasar began in August 1948. She was on an inspection task in Dobruja during the antimalarial campaign when it was announced that she was released from office as Health Minister. The decision was made without any prior explanation. Years of contradictory rumors, intimidation, emergence of provocative agents, followed. In 1951, her closest collaborator at the Center for Mental Hygiene, Florica Nicolescu, was arrested, without a warrant of arrest; she was released after two years of imprisonment, without trial, without knowing what the allegations were. The campaign against Dr. Florica Bagdasar culminated on January 18, 1953, with an article in the Scînteia newspaper entitled "To Clean Pedagogy of Anti-Science Deformations". Immediately after the article appeared, an official delegation descended at the Mental Hygiene Center and Florica Bagdasar was removed from the position of director and forced to hand over the files and keys of the Institute on the spot. All this in spite of the eloquent appreciation she received for the work of the Center from Prof. Vlad Voiculescu. The shock was so great that she became seriously ill, had been hospitalized for a long time in the Filaret hospital, and had to undergo a very serious lung surgery with minimal chances of survival. But, miraculously, she began recovering. Meanwhile, as the Party had decreed, the article about her in Scînteia was "discussed" in special long sessions at all schools and hospitals in the country. The complete article in Scînteia was accusing Florica Bagdasar of "cosmopolitanism", of sluggish plunder in front of the rotten bourgeois ideology, of perversion of infantile psychiatry by introducing Freud-like obscurantist approaches, etc. She had been repeatedly investigated. She was left with no income, because her husband's pension from the Academy was stopped, and the "Housing Department/Spatiul Locativ" forced her to share with another family with two children the apartment where she lived with her daughter. Ostracization was complete: it was a period of fierce political disgrace, persecution, material shortages, illness. The irony of fate made that her serious illness most probably saved her from a more terrible fate, that of a "dimisal trail" based on the so-called deviations she was accused of.
At the end of 1956, the wave of Stalinist terror had passed over, and Florica Bagdasar began to be "rehabilitated". She was asked to rejoin the party, which she refused. In October 1957 she was appointed Vice-President of the Red Cross in Romania, a position in which she worked for several years. She was also given permission to travel abroad, and had the opportunity to visit her daughter in the US several times. She continued to live in Romania until the end of her days in 1978, being treated by the government in a "quasi-particular" way as Valeriu Negru's states in an article: " she was tolerated politically, but not liked."
The dramatic end of Florica Bagdasar was described by American writer Saul Bellow in his novel The Dean's December. Saul Bellow accompanied his wife, Alexandra Bellow, to Romania when her mother, Florica Bagdasar, was seriously ill and dying. Florica Bagdasar is one of the main characters in that novel.