Unpublished data on the founder of Romanian Neurosurgery – Professor Dumitru Bagdasar

Abstract

Dumitru Bagdasar, who is indisputably considered as the founder of neurosurgery on the Romanian territory during the interwar period, was born in Ro?ie?ti, the former F?lciu County, in 1893. In 1913, after having completed his primary and secondary education, he enrolled at the Faculty of Medicine of Bucharest and, in the summer of 1916, at the end of his third university year, he transferred to the Medical Military Institute. From 1916 to 1918, D. Bagdasar dealt with the whole array of illnesses arising from the world conflict, including firearm-related injuries to the nervous system. After the war, he was transferred to the Neurology Clinic of the Colentina Hospital where, under the supervision of Professor Gheorghe Marinescu, he elaborated and completed his doctoral dissertation entitled: Contribu?iuni la studiul Sindromului Parkinsonian-postencefalitic (Contributions to the Study of Postencephalitic Parkinsonism), which he defended in 1922. From 1922 to 1926, at the Military Hospital of Bucharest, he completed his neurology internship under the guidance of the eminent neurologist Dumitru Noica and his initiation to surgery under Professor Mihail Butoianu. In 1927, after giving up his military contract, he was transferred to the Jimbolia Hospital by the Ministry of Health to work as an attending neuropsychiatrist. At the end of the same year, with a recommendation from Professor Nicolae Paulescu, he earned a neurosurgery specialisation scholarship under Professor Harvey Cushing in Boston. There, under the guidance of Professor Cushing and Doctor Bailey, he wrote two papers: Le traitement Chirurgical des gommes cérébrales and Intracranial Chordoblastoma, which were published in prestigious medical journals. In 1929, he returned to the Jimbolia Hospital where, in 1930, he performed his first neurosurgical procedures. At the end of 1931, he transferred to the Cern?u?i Hospital, again as a neuropsychiatrist, and in the following two years he performed a number of 149 operations on the central nervous system, which are described in the surgical reports written by Doctor Bagdasar himself. In 1934, he transferred to Bucharest, where he performed neurosurgical procedures in two hospitals (Emergency Hospital and Central Hospital) and, at the end of the same year, he was tenured as an attending neurosurgeon at the Central Hospital, following a contest organised by the Ministry of Health. From 1935, he worked primarily in the aforementioned hospital but he also performed operations in other hospitals (Emergency, Col?ea, Military etc.). Alongside his surgical activity, he was also interested in the histopathology of the operated tumours, he wrote scientific papers based on his own case reports, participated in medical congresses (Bucharest, Bern, Chisinau etc.) and became interested in the social-political issues of the time..., joining the Communist Party in 1943. In 1940, just before the outburst of World War II, he wrote Acute craniocerebral trauma and published it in Probleme de Medicin? de R?zboiu (War Medicine Issues). During the war, due to his over a decade long experience in neurosurgical procedures, he assisted the injured (both militaries and civilians), while also managing common neurosurgical cases in Romania and the adjacent countries and even in Palestine, as a member of the so-called “golden team” (C. Arseni, I. Ionescu, Irina Ogrezeanu-Ionescu). In 1945, he was appointed Minister of Health and at the end of the same year, he became the first professor of neurosurgery in Romania. Unfortunately, his life came to an abrupt end on 16 July 1946 because of a metastatic brain tumour probably caused by primary lung cancer.