The Bucharest Municipality Museum and “Carol Davila” University of Medicine and Pharmacy in Bucharest are proud to announce the opening of the outdoor photography exhibition “100 years of Romanian Medicine”.
The exhibition is split into two modules that can be visited at two different locations of the “Carol Davila” University of Medicine and Pharmacy: at the Faculty of Medicine – No. 8 Eroii Sanitari Boulevard, 5th district and at the Chancellor Office – No. 37 Dionisie Lupu Street, 1st district.
One hundred years ago, Romanian medicine had already established an international fame for itself with the founding of the National School of Medicine and Pharmacy by Carol Davila, in 1857, and the Faculty of Medicine, in 1869, as part of the University of Bucharest. Therefore, the images will reflect the way that Romanian higher medical education worked at a level comparable to that of similar European institutions of established tradition. Romanian medical sciences took a large leap forward due to the efforts of great figures such as Victor Babeş, Thoma Ionescu, Gheorghe Marinescu, Ioan Cantacuzino, Francisc Iosif Rainer, the Minovici brothers or Constantin I. Parhon, founders of specialized medical schools of international recognition, which were studying great medical subjects: hygiene and health education for the prevention and improvement of the population’s general health; treatment in hospitals; anatomy and physiology – the structures and functions of the organism; pathology – causes and mechanism of illnesses; interferences between medicine and legislation within forensic medicine.
After the difficult times of World War I, when the Romanian health system faced serious epidemic diseases, such as exanthematic typhus, cholera, the recurrent fever also known as typhoid fever, the organization of health-care services gradually started to make important progresses. The hospitals’ bed capacity increased, new polyclinics and health-care centers were created and in order to fight and prevent contagious diseases, a health-care network was founded and the first sanatoriums for tubercular patients were built. In time, prophylactic medical care for the population started to be applied all throughout the territory’s health-care centers, down the entire system-chain. Also, clinical medicine, such as internal medicine and surgery, registered great progress due to the development of biomedicine and the evolution of investigation methods and technologies. This way, new specialized institutes emerged such as the institutes of bacteriology, internal medicine, infra-micro-biology (virology), public health and hygiene. The images depict medical offices, examination rooms, dental surgeries, school medical rooms, medical devices and operating theaters.
The Romanian pharmaceutical industry diversified at the same time with the pharmaceutical education – the Faculty of Pharmacy was founded in 1923 as part of the medical education system. Within the country’s pharmacies and drugstores, apart from important “specialties” – as they were called back then – the number of drugs produced in Romania’s own laboratories started to increase significantly. The preparation of large quantities of medical formulas by Romanian pharmacists, renowned and awarded nationally and internationally, the purchase of foreign brevets and technologies, as well as modernizing pharmacies with technological devices, marked the first important steps in creating industrialized synthetical drugs. All throughout the 20th century, pharmaceutical productions met a rapid rhythm of growth due to the support of prestigious Romanian research institutes and to their collaboration with Western pharmaceutical concerns.
The producers of this exhibition are Cezar Petre Buiumaci and Ana Iacob, museologists at the Bucharest Municipality Museum. The exhibition remains open until October 31st 2018.
Consulting services provided by Professor Octavian Buda (UMF Carol Davila).