Professor Constantin Dimitrescu-Severeanu Our Father and Contemporary (1840-1930)
Vasile Sârbu, Silviu ConstantinoiuHistory of medicine, no. 1, 2017
Article DOI: 10.21614/chirurgia.112.1.7
Constantin Dimitrescu-Severeanu is for us, contemporary Romanian surgeons, a monumental figure, perceived unjustly as old, originating in the museum's halls of national medicine, someone like Péan, Volkmann, Nélaton, Guyon, Langenbeck, Esmarch or Billroth to countries where they lived. Nationally, his figure has been somewhat pushed into the past by Thoma Ionescu the creator of the National School of Surgery. It is necessary to look by comparison between the brilliance and modernism of Thoma Ionescu and Severeanu`s efforts to get us out, like Moses from the egyptian slavery, out of the old ways of surgery without anesthesia, antiseptics, without asepsia, when opening of the womb, the chest and cranial cavity was not even thought by someone. Severeanu said that in 1864 and Thoma Ionescu returned to Bucharest from Paris after 30 years in 1895, when the big leap and synchronization with European medicine had been done. His childhood in the Cioponea family, a hardworking family of 12 children, from Baltaţi (Mehedinţi) is well known. Constantin came into the world on May 4, 1840, beginning primary school at the age of 13 in Turnu Severin, then at the age of 15 enrolling at Davila School and then performing his last 2 years as a student in Paris where he got his PhD in 1864. He was then a secondary physician at Colentina Hospital, then primary physician at Colţea Hospital (1869), where there was a surgery department headed by Professor Nicolae Turnescu, the firs Dean (1869) of the newly founded Faculty of Medicine in Bucharest. At Colţea Hospital he will lead for 40 years (1870-1910) a department of surgery in which his great achievements will be done.
