Florica Bagdasar was a Romanian neuropsychiatrist, who was the first woman minister in Romania at the Ministry of Health between 1946 and 1948.
28 Facts About Florica Bagdasar
1.
2.
Florica Bagdasar's mother was Anastasia Ciumetti ; 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.
3.
Florica Bagdasar was related to the Aromanian historian and philologist Nicolae Serban Tanasoca, more precisely being the second cousin of his mother.
4.
Florica Bagdasar graduated from Roman Voda High School in 1920.
5.
Florica Bagdasar was admitted to the School of Medicine in Bucharest, from which she graduated in 1925.
6.
The newly-weds Bagdasars went to Boston, Massachusetts to pursue professional training; Florica to attend Public Health courses at Harvard University, and 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.
7.
In 1935, Dumitru Florica Bagdasar obtained, through a competition exam, the right to open the first neurosurgery clinic in Bucharest.
8.
Until he was able to create his own neurosurgery team, it was his wife, Florica Bagdasar, who was the only one constantly at his side in the operating room, assisting and encouraging him.
9.
Florica Bagdasar dedicated herself to the field of neuropsychiatric and educational pediatric care.
10.
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.
11.
In 1946 Florica Bagdasar created the Center for Mental Hygiene in Bucharest, at 14, Vasile Lascar Street, whose mission was to treat children with mental deficiencies and behavioral disorders.
12.
Florica Bagdasar served as director of the Center for Mental Hygiene until January 1953.
13.
In 1946, after the death of her husband, who had been the Minister of Health in the Petru Groza government, Florica Bagdasar was asked to become the Minister of Health, as her husband's successor.
14.
Florica Bagdasar occupied this position from 1 December 1946 to 21 January 1951.
15.
Dr Florica Bagdasar became the first woman to lead a ministerial cabinet in Romania's government.
16.
In 1949, Florica Bagdasar was appointed associate professor at the Medical-Pharmaceutical Institute in Bucharest, where she introduced the specialty of pediatric neuropsychiatry.
17.
Florica Bagdasar became a promoter of infantile neuropsychiatry, both theoretical and practical, creating valuable specialists.
18.
Florica Bagdasar walked in the footsteps of her husband, Dumitru Bagdasar, who had a left political position since his youth.
19.
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.
20.
Florica Bagdasar was on an inspection task in Dobruja during the antimalarial campaign when it was announced that she was released from office as Health Minister.
21.
In 1951, her closest collaborator at the Center for Mental Hygiene, Florica Bagdasar Nicolescu, was arrested, without a warrant of arrest; she was released after two years of imprisonment, without trial, without knowing what the allegations were.
22.
The campaign against Florica Bagdasar culminated on January 18,1953, with an article in the Scinteia newspaper entitled "To Clean Pedagogy of Anti-Science Deformations".
23.
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.
24.
Florica Bagdasar was left with no income, because her husband's pension from the academy was stopped, and the Housing Department forced her to share with another family with two children the apartment where she lived with her daughter.
25.
Florica Bagdasar was asked to rejoin the party, which she refused.
26.
Florica Bagdasar was given permission to travel abroad, and had the opportunity to visit her daughter in the United States several times.
27.
Saul Bellow accompanied his wife, Alexandra Bellow, to Romania when her mother, Florica Bagdasar, was seriously ill and dying.
28.
Florica Bagdasar is one of the main characters in that novel.