Women in our HISTORY
Diana Florescu “Atanasie Marienescu” High school, Lipova
Class 11B
Professor Carmen Butaciu
Florica Bagdasar was born in January 24, 1901 in Monastir/Bitola, Ottoman Empire and died in December 19 ,1978, Bucharest. She was a physician with the specialty of infantile neuropsychiatry and was the first woman minister in Romania at the Ministry of Health between 1946-1948. Florica Bagdasar came from a Macedonian/Aromanian family: her father was Sterie Ciumetti, bridge and road engineer, and high school math teacher. Her mother was Anastasia Ciumetti, born Papahagi, sister of Pericle Papahagi, an acknowledged authority on the life and languages of the Romance-speaking peoples from south of the Danube, the Aromanians. She started school at the Pompilian private boarding School , but because of the World War I and the state of refuge, she continued high school in Moldavia in the town of Roman, graduating from the "Roman Vodă" high school in 1920. She was admitted to the School of Medicine in Bucharest, from which she graduated in 1925. After her years of internships and externship 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 Dr. Dumitru Bagdasar with whom she had a model marriage. 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 at Dr. Harvey Cushing's Clinic, the pioneer of modern brain surgery. While in Boston, Florica Bagdasar received a Rockefeller Scholarship. 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 person at his side in the operating room and constantly encouraging him.
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 (Stafiescu), have successfully developed and experienced in numerous primary schools their own alphabet textbook ("The Book for All Children") and their own arithmetic manual. In 1946 Dr. Florica Bagdasar created the Center for Mental Hygiene in Bucharest whose mission was to treat children with mental deficiencies and behavioral disorders. 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, andkinesiotherapists. 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 ofendemic typhus in Moldovia and malaria in Dobruja. Dr. Paul Cortez, 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 (IMF) where she introduced the specialty of pediatric neuropsychiatry (Normal and Pathological Child Psychology). 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.
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. 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.
The complete article in ScĂŽnteia was accusing Florica Bagdasar of "cosmopolitanism", of sluggish plunder in front of the rotten bourgeois ideology, of perversion of infantile psychiatry by introducing Freudlike 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. 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. 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 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."
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