Grigore T. Popa
Grigore T. Popa | |
---|---|
Born | |
Died | July 18, 1948 | (aged 56)
Nationality | Romanian |
Other names | Gregor T. Popa |
Alma mater | University of Iași |
Known for | research into the hypophyseal portal system |
Children | Tudorel Popa |
Scientific career | |
Fields | Morphology Endocrinology Neuromorphology |
Institutions | |
Academic advisors | Nicolae Hortolomei, Francisc Rainer |
Notable students | Constantin Bălăceanu-Stolnici, George Emil Palade |
Grigore T. Popa (sometimes
Ill-treated by successive
Biography
Origins and early career
Born in Șurănești, Vaslui County, his parents Maria and Toader were poor răzeși, peasants who owned their own plot of land.[1] The family was related to Emil Condurachi, future historian and archeologist.[2] Grigore, the couple's eleventh child,[3] was intellectually precocious. His mother noticed his aptitude early on, and despite great material difficulties, including selling off their land so he could finish high school, his parents managed to provide him with an education.[1] As argued by historian Lucian Boia, Popa's lowly origin and his successful career stand as evidence of an "upward social mobility" in the pre-1944 Kingdom of Romania.[4]
Raised a Romanian Orthodox, Popa blended his belief in core Christian principles with an interest in science.[5] At the age of fifteen, he translated Ernst Haeckel's General Morphology into Romanian and obtained the author's written permission to publish.[3] He would later translate Gray's Anatomy as well.[3][6] Popa graduated from the National College in Iași and entered the Natural Sciences faculty of the local university. However, as his parents had no more money for his schooling and there were no scholarships left, he switched to the Medical faculty, where there was one scholarship, even though the field did not attract him.[1]
Upon seeing cadavers being dissected for the first time, he fainted and had to be revived with cold water by an assistant. However, he persevered in his studies and was helped in particular by two professors,
In July 1918, he married Florica Cernătescu, a university classmate. A native of Huși, her maternal grandfather was the chemist Petru Poni.[6] Also trained by Rainer[12] and herself a decorated wartime physician,[6] she went on to become associate professor of Histology and his closest scientific collaborator over the years. The couple had two sons and two daughters.[3][13] Popa eventually followed Rainer to the University of Bucharest's medical faculty in 1920, and was appointed assistant professor.[7] With Rainer as his doctoral advisor, Popa completed his docent degree, describing the functional structure of the dura mater.[14] Over the course of his career, his students included some twenty-two university professors and Romanian Academy members, among them George Emil Palade[15][16] and Constantin Bălăceanu-Stolnici.[17]
Rise to prominence
By January 1924, when Rainer's alleged Jewish extraction made him a target of antisemitic agitation among the students, Popa became Rainer's voice in professional disputes. As such, he accused a Iași anatomist, Victor Papilian, of plagiarism, and published his take on the matter in the Bucharest daily Adevărul.[18] Papilian retorted with accusations of sectarianism against Popa, Rainer, and the whole "Bucharest school": "a sterile and envious school", "a grand society of mutual admirers, wherein master and students have declared each other geniuses".[19] Popa identified Iași with extreme nationalism, and, in a 1925 article for the student review Viața Universitară, accused the far-right National-Christian Defense League of hypocrisy. As he noted, its "hatred and brutality" were not just aimed at Jews, but also at Romanians coming in from Bessarabia, since the latter were ostensibly socialists.[20]
With Rainer's help,
In 1928, Popa became professor of anatomy at Iași,[7] the city associated with his rivals. For many years he taught histology, Anatomical Pathology and Legal Medicine, as required,[27] and was also curator of Sfântul Spiridon Hospital, as well as head of the Physicians and Naturalists' Society.[16] His confrontation with the city's antisemitic far-right became direct. In late 1929, he presided over a commission tasked with investigating the race riot at Iași medical faculty. He found that the Jewish and Romanian students were racially segregated during teaching hours, which contributed to the tensions, but could not identify students directly responsible for the incident.[28]
With time, Popa became a noted public speaker in support of modernization, and a popularizer of Western science. In 1931, he gave a public lecture on "The Former and Current Situation of Iași", which recognized that the city had greatly decayed, materially and culturally, since 1866. He attributed this decline to psychological factors (a city with "depressed", "disinterested" and "filthy" inhabitants), but also to
A corresponding member of the Romanian Academy from 1936,[31] Grigore T. Popa was Dean of the Iași medical faculty for two years, from 1938 to 1940.[27] At around that time, he drifted apart from his mentor Rainer, and relations between them became "tense".[32] According to a popular account that Popa repeatedly challenged, Rainer had claimed the discovery of the hypophyseal portal system some years before Popa and Fielding.[33]
Antifascism
In January 1936, together with writers Mihail Sadoveanu, George Topîrceanu and Mihai Codreanu, Popa founded Însemnări Ieșene ("Recordings from Iași"), a magazine of commentary. With his intercession, the original group grew to include other intellectuals, including philosopher Ion Petrovici[34] and physician-novelist I. I. Mironescu.[35] He also used the magazine to popularize the anthropological work of his former teacher, Elliott Smith.[36] Însemnări Ieșene ran for four years, coinciding with the peak of political turmoil. It borrowed inspiration from Viața Românească, Romania's classical tribune of social criticism, with Popa joining in the trend. As argued in 2012 by author Constantin Coroiu, Popa expanded the magazine's focus beyond cultural matters: "He takes up issues, analyses and criticizes mindsets, mores, inertia, cowardice, grave failures of character, and, what's more, the scourges of Romanian, and even European, society in his own day and ever since."[22]
At Însemnări Ieșene, which, under Topîrceanu's guidance, made efforts to preserve its political independence,[35] Popa took a firm stand against the violently fascist Iron Guard, and denounced scientific racism.[3][37] As noted by Boia, Popa took "moderately left-wing positions and [was] persistent in his defense of democracy."[38] According to his student Bălăceanu-Stolnici, he had "a left-wing orientation of the British Labourite kind".[17] Citing the need for intellectual freedom, he publicly defended Sadoveanu, who was being attacked by his far-right colleagues, with pieces in the left-leaning newspaper Dimineața.[39] Although active in such civil society causes, he was never a member of a political party,[27] and also administered criticism to the establishment National Peasants' Party. In his articles for Însemnări Ieșene, he accuses the National Peasantists of corruption and politicking.[35]
Popa criticized the breakdown of Romanian democracy and the creation of a
In October 1939—shortly after the
The Iron Guard was ultimately toppled in the
In April 1944, together with other prominent intellectuals, Popa signed a petition asking Antonescu to seek peace with the
Anticommunism
Popa gave a cautious welcome to the
His uncompromising stance stunned members of the Petru Groza cabinet, in particular Voitec.[63] At a conference in 1945, he praised the British and American university systems, drawing a vehement letter of rebuke from Constantin Ion Parhon, who considered the Soviet model as optimal.[64] As noted in 2009 by historian Bogdan Cristian Iacob, Popa's stance showed "a glaring lack of sense for the times", "an incapacity to grasp that the Academy and University were not, at least initially, attacked on the basis of the scholarship produced, but from political positions." According to Iacob, Popa was callous in not showing a willingness to indict those of his medical school colleagues who had careers in the Iron Guard.[65]
Following his clash with Parhon, Popa took the even more drastic step of resigning from the Romanian Society for Friendship with the Soviet Union.[66] Also in 1945, he began aiding Constant Tonegaru's "Mihai Eminescu Society", a secret opposition group that distributed appeals for help to the West. He used his dean's cabinet as a storage room for such anticommunist propaganda.[3][67] During this period, he was attacked and robbed by a group of three Soviet soldiers, which he interpreted as a warning.[3]
Popa signed his name to a public protest decrying vote-rigging during the November 1946 election; there were ten other signatories, including aviator Smaranda Brăescu and Army General Aurel Aldea. It reached the Allied Commission, and, after being examined by Soviet representatives, served as incriminating evidence for the protesters' repression.[68] Popa's final public appearance took the form of a speech before the academy in April 1947. From an unassuming title, which implied a lecture about "nervous tension and the century's disease",[3][40] it turned abruptly to political critique, likening the abuses of Nazism to those of communism. Popa's concept of "nervous tension", theorized by Popa from texts by Guglielmo Ferrero, was in fact the collective fear imposed by totalitarianism, which leads man to "hide the reservations imposed by his consciousness."[69] Terror was inevitable, but ultimately inefficient:
dictators [...] shall always be powerlessly arrested on the edge of our meditative nervous network, which they cannot control and cannot deform. There, in his own cortex, man still endures free [...]. But if, in order to make sure that they have expunged it, dictators should crucify [their victims], then the spirit, with its invisible vibrations, shall make its way from the crucified to the still-chained, and the miracle of a new resurrection will become possible, the resurrection of freedom, without which humanity would become extinct.[70]
Popa returned to his ideas on "semi-civilization", describing revolution as an enemy of natural selection, in either its Darwinian or Lamarckism (Popa favored neither of the latter theories, viewing them as compatible).[71] With "racism", "historical materialism" was "a dangerous simplification" of human endeavor.[3][72] He warned that communism, like Nazism, was going to "exterminate, propagating hatred and violence toward any belief but its own."[73] His was also an appeal against immoral but "exact" science, describing ideologues as "disciples of the Antichrist": "In this grave situation, the time has come for any conscience that is still pure to ask themselves: 'Where to?' And the answer will not be hard to find: 'Back to Christian morality!'".[74] According to political scientist Ioan Stanomir, this sample of "Christian democracy" managed to reconcile the political expression of Romanian Orthodoxy, previously monopolized by the far-right, with "political freedom, understood as a set of guarantees against ideological and administrative arbitrariness."[74]
Communist persecution and death
According to Popa's own recollection, the audience sat stone-faced through the delivery of Popa's speech, and rushed for the exits once it was over.[3] More optimistically, Constantin Rădulescu-Motru, a fellow anticommunist academician, wrote that those making an "ostentatious" exit were friends of the Soviet regime, such as Sadoveanu and Parhon. The core public cheered, as if "the Academy were infused with revolt and [...] no one takes for granted the existence of Russian democracy—that blend of dictatorship and gangsterism."[75] As argued by Stanomir, Popa "spoke out inadmissible truths and gave value appraisals to a regime that was just getting ready to impose Stalinist orthodoxy upon the intellectuals. [...] The coming world had discovered a witness that would not hesitate to diagnose it."[40] Within days, Popa was asked to attend a meeting with the Communist Interior Minister, Teohari Georgescu, but he casually refused.[17] When the Gendarmes were dispatched to arrest him at his residence on the university campus, hundreds of students formed a chain and blocked their entrance.[3][17]
His oppositional stance led to his removal from the academy with the enthusiastic approval of fellow scientists Săvulescu and Parhon,[9] from the deanship and, in 1946, from teaching.[76] This was accomplished with a novel procedure, which formally eliminated ("compressed") the teaching position, but also singled out the person in charge for further inquiry.[77] One individual who fought to force Popa out of teaching was Simion Oeriu, a communist without scientific training who was nonetheless appointed professor against Popa's objections. Another means used to target him was a proposal to admit hundreds of students who had been victims of Nazi oppression in Northern Transylvania, some of whom spoke no Romanian, and award them doctorates in two or three years.[63] When Popa refused, he was called a "reactionary" and even an Iron Guard sympathizer. A first attempt to fire him met with resistance from the medical students, who were very fond of their teacher. When he was ultimately dismissed, he remained unemployed; his lifelong friend Sadoveanu did not intervene.[63]
Although seriously ill with
Over the course of the communist period, there was a concerted effort to banish Popa's memory,
Popa's widow was obligated to live in a tiny apartment on the outskirts of Bucharest; she died in 1986, in her mid-90s.[3][6] One of the couple's sons, Grigore Gr., himself became a doctor, while the other, Tudorel, was an actor.[3] As youngsters, Tudorel Popa and his sister Marilena were both involved with their father in aiding the anticommunist underground.[67] Tudorel Popa's son, Vlad Tudor Popa, is a chemist, head of the Romanian Academy's Institute of Physical Chemistry.[79] Grigore Gr. died in 2006; his son is the novelist and critic Dumitru Radu Popa.[3]
Notes
- ^ a b c Petrovanu, p.19
- ^ Nastasă (2007), p.160
- ^ a b c d e f g h i j k l m n o p q r s t u v w (in Romanian) Dumitru Radu Popa, "Liber sub dictatură: Gr. T. Popa", Viața Românească, Nr. 5-6/2010
- ^ Boia, p.341
- ^ Stanomir, pp.40–41
- ^ a b c d (in Romanian) Richard Constantinescu, "Dr. Florica Cernătescu-Popa", Viața Medicală, Nr. 38/2011
- ^ a b c d Petrovanu, p.20
- ^ Riga et al., p.180
- ^ a b c Petrescu, p.371
- ^ Riga et al., pp.69–70
- ^ Marius Chelcu, "Un memoriu al ieșenilor la sfârșitul Marelui Război. Îngrijorările și speranțele unui nou început", in Analele Științifice ale Universității Alexandru Ioan Cuza din Iași. Istorie, Vol. LXIV, Special Issue: "Marea Unire a românilor (1918)—Istorie și actualitate", 2018, pp.577, 579, 582
- ^ Riga et al., pp.70, 180
- ^ Petrescu, p.372
- ^ Riga et al., pp.382, 383, 384
- ^ a b c d Petrovanu, p.23
- ^ a b c d e f (in Romanian) "Recuperări. Jurnalul unui savant român în America", Ziarul Financiar, June 13, 2014
- ^ a b c d e f g (in Romanian) Constantin Coroiu, "Un erou intelectual: Gr. T. Popa (I)" Archived 2014-07-14 at the Wayback Machine, Cultura, Nr. 396, November 2012
- ^ Constantinescu, "Grigore T. Popa și Victor Papilian...", passim
- ^ Constantinescu, "Grigore T. Popa și Victor Papilian...", p.39
- ISBN 0-8014-8688-2, p.258
- ^ Riga et al., pp.70, 383
- ^ a b c d (in Romanian) Constantin Coroiu, "Un erou intelectual: Gr. T. Popa (II)" Archived 2014-07-14 at the Wayback Machine, Cultura, Nr. 397, November 2012
- ^ Petrovanu, p.21
- ^ (in French) Grigore T. Popa, "Sur la motilité des spermatozoïdes chez quelques vertébrés supérieurs (taureau, bélier, homme)", in Comptes rendus hebdomadaires des séances de la Société de biologie et de ses filiales, Vol. 100, Masson et Cie., Paris, 1929, pp.45–46 (digitized by the Bibliothèque nationale de France Gallica digital library)
- ^ Sally O'Neill, "Fielding, Una Lucy (1888–1969)", Australian Dictionary of Biography, National Centre of Biography, Australian National University, 1996; Petrovanu, p.21; Popa (1945), pp.230–231
- ^ Gregor T. Popa, Eug. Lucinescu, "The Mechanostructure of the Pericardium", Journal of Anatomy, 67 (Pt. 1), October 1932, p.78-107 (digitized by the United States National Library of Medicine)
- ^ a b c Petrovanu, p.22
- ISBN 978-6-06-927445-3, pp.427–429
- ^ Nastasă (2007), pp.292–293
- OCLC 1947755, p.421
- ^ (in Romanian) Membrii Academiei Române din 1866 până în prezent at the Romanian Academy site; Petrovanu, p.21
- ISBN 973-50-0425-9, p.105
- ^ Popa (1945), passim; Riga et al., pp.138, 383–384
- ^ a b (in Romanian) Peregrinus, "Edituri ieșene, autori ieșeni" Archived 2014-07-14 at the Wayback Machine, Convorbiri Literare, May 2009
- ^ a b c (in Romanian) Constantin Coroiu, "Un erou intelectual: Gr. T. Popa (III)" Archived 2014-07-14 at the Wayback Machine, Cultura, Nr. 398, November 2012
- ^ Petru Comarnescu, "O incalculabil de importantă teorie asupra originii statuei-portret și a altor arte", Revista Fundațiilor Regale, Nr. 8/1944, p.468
- ^ Drăgănescu, p.6
- ^ a b Boia, p.185
- ^ Boia, pp.78–79
- ^ a b c d Stanomir, p.37
- ^ Al. Mironescu, "Cronici. În memoria doctorului Cantacuzino", Revista Fundațiilor Regale, Nr. 3/1938, pp.692–693
- ^ Drăgănescu, pp.2–7, 8–9
- ^ "Revista revistelor. Toate suferințele muncitorești și-au regăsit ecou în inima Regelui", Revista Fundațiilor Regale, Nr. 7/1940, p.217
- ^ Ioana Ursu, Ioan Lăcustă, "În București, acum 50 ani", Magazin Istoric, October 1939, p.46
- ^ Valeriu Florin Dobrinescu, "Contribuții la cunoașterea situației studenților ieșeni în perioada 1 septembrie 1939—6 septembrie 1940", Carpica. Publicația Muzeului de Istorie și Artă Bacău, Vol. VI, 1973–1974, p.203
- ^ "Revista revistelor. Însemnări Ieșene se dedică Basarabiei și Bucovinei", Revista Fundațiilor Regale, Nr. 10/1940, pp.224–225
- ^ Iacob, p.265; Petrovanu, p.22
- ^ Boia, pp.244, 256
- ^ Ioan Opriș, "Pedepsirea teologilor legionari rebeli", Annales Universitatis Apulensis. Series Historica, Vol. 12, I, 2008, pp.203–204
- ^ Boia, p.237
- ^ Petrovanu, pp.22–23
- ^ Bălăceanu-Stolnici, p.15
- ^ Petru Comarnescu, "Tipăriturile Școalei Sociologice dela București (II)", Revista Fundațiilor Regale, Nr. 8/1944, pp.422–423
- ^ Boia, pp.236–237
- ^ Boia, p.235; Iacob, p.265; Petroveanu, pp.235–237
- ^ a b Boia, p.235
- ^ Boia, pp.235–236
- ^ a b (in Romanian) Solomon Marcus, "Halucinantul an 1944", România Literară, Nr. 45/2004
- ^ Boia, p.257
- ^ Iacob, p.265
- ^ Boia, p.256-258; Iacob, pp.264–266
- ^ "Lumea de mâine văzută de d-nii D. Gusti, P. P. Negulescu, Gr. T. Popa, M. Sadoveanu, T. Arghezi, M. Ralea, Tudor Vianu, G. Călinescu și F. Aderca", Revista Fundațiilor Regale, Nr. 3/1945, pp.691–692; Boia, p.287; Stanomir, p.36
- ^ a b c Petrescu, p.370
- ^ Petrescu, p.370. See also Iacob, p.269
- ^ Iacob, p.264-265
- ^ Iacob, p.266; Petrescu, p.370
- ^ a b (in Romanian) Alex. Ștefănescu, Cicerone Ionițoiu, "Constant Tonegaru - deținut politic" Archived 2011-07-28 at the Wayback Machine, România Literară, Nr. 3/2002
- ^ Valeriu Avram, "Smaranda Brăescu – o pasăre îm văzduh", in Magazin Istoric, May 2001, p.62
- ^ Stanomir, pp.37–38
- ^ Stanomir, pp.39–40
- ^ Drăgănescu, pp.3–4
- ^ Drăgănescu, p.4
- ^ Stanomir, pp.38–39
- ^ a b Stanomir, p.41
- ^ (in Romanian) Codrin Liviu Cuțitaru, "Istoriografia românească și dictatura", Observator Cultural, Nr. 58, April 2001
- ^ Boia, pp.257–258; Iacob, p.268; Petrovanu, p.23
- ^ Iacob, p.268
- ^ (in Romanian) Universitatea de Medicină și Farmacie "Grigore T. Popa" at the Iași City Hall site
- ^ a b (in Romanian) Ion Mitican, "Universitatea de Medicină Gr. T. Popa are o soră mai mică în Dăneștii Vasluiului", Curierul de Iași, June 20, 2011
References
- ISBN 978-973-748-855-8
- ISBN 978-973-50-3533-4
- (in Romanian) Richard Constantinescu, "Grigore T. Popa și Victor Papilian între 'juriu de onoare' și polemică", Revista Medicală Română, Nr. 1/2011, pp. 37–40
- (in Romanian) Mihai Drăgănescu, "Grigore T. Popa: O gândire despre cunoaștere, moralitate și societate", Noema, Nr. 1/2002, pp. 2–9
- Bogdan Cristian Iacob, "Avatars of the Romanian Academy and the Historical Front: 1948 versus 1955", in ISBN 978-963-9776-63-0
- Lucian Nastasă, "Suveranii" universităților românești. Mecanisme de selecție și promovare a elitei intelectuale, Vol. I. ISBN 978-973-726-278-3
- Arcadiu Petrescu, "Profesor Dr. Grigore T. Popa", in Vasile Igna (ed.), Subteranele memoriei. ISBN 978-973815-751-4
- I. Petrovanu, "Grigore T. Popa", in Eugen Târcoveanu, Constantin Romanescu, Mihai Lițu (eds.), 125 de ani de învățământ medical superior la Iași. Ed. Gr. T. Popa, Iași, 2004, ISBN 978-973790-670-0
- Grigore T. Popa, "Note. Asupra descoperirii sistemului portal hipofizar", Revista Fundațiilor Regale, Nr. 1/1945, pp. 229–231
- Dan Riga, Sorin Riga, Ilie Th. Riga, Gheorghe Călin, Anatomie și antropologie. Eseuri și sinteze. Cartea Universitară, Bucharest, 2008, ISBN 978-973-731-610-3
- ISBN 973-681-817-9