Grigore T. Popa (sometimes Anglicized to Gregor T. Popa; 1 May 1892 – 18 July 1948) was a Romanian physician and public intellectual. Of lowly peasant origin, he managed to obtain a university education and become a professor at two of his country's leading universities. An anatomist by specialty, Popa worked on popularizing modern science, reforming the medical and higher education systems, and, in war hospitals, as a decorated and publicly acclaimed practitioner. His work in endocrinology and neuromorphology was valued abroad, while at home he helped train a generation of leading doctors.
Ill-treated by successive fascist dictatorships, Popa adhered to moderate left-wing ideals and publicized them by means of his review, Însemnări Ieșene. He criticized Marxism as much as scientific racism, but condemned Romania's participation in the war against the Soviets, and, in 1944, joined a protest movement of high-profile academics. During his final years, his anticommunism and his Christian democratic stances brought him into conflict with the authorities. The Communist Romanian regime drove him out of his teaching position and harassed him until his death in middle age. Upon the restoration of democracy, his alma mater and the school where he taught for much of his career was named in his honor.
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.Petrovanu, p.19 The family was related to Emil Condurachi, future historian and archeologist.Nastasă (2007), p.160 Grigore, the couple's eleventh child, Dumitru Radu Popa, "Liber sub dictatură: Gr. T. Popa", Viața Românească, Nr. 5-6/2010 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. 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.Boia, p.341
Raised a Romanian Orthodox, Popa blended his belief in core Christian principles with an interest in science.Stanomir, pp.40–41 At the age of fifteen, he translated Ernst Haeckel's General Morphology into Romanian and obtained the author's written permission to publish. He would later translate Gray's Anatomy as well. Richard Constantinescu, "Dr. Florica Cernătescu-Popa", Viața Medicală, Nr. 38/2011 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.
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, Nicolae Hortolomei and Francisc Rainer, becoming the latter's assistant after graduation. As later noted by surgeon Ilie Th. Riga, who was his colleague on Rainer's team, "we lived for years in the most select atmosphere that education may breed": "It is to [Rainer] that we owe our character, the awakening of our scientific interest".Riga et al., p.180 During World War I, Popa cared for the wounded and sick at Iași's Sfântul Spiridon Hospital, earning him a knighthood in the Order of the Crown. In May 1918, following Romania's withdrawal from war, Popa applied to rejoin Rainer's team in Bucharest, where Rainer was performing experimental surgery on wounded soldiers.Riga et al., pp.69–70 Late in 1918, Popa also joined A. C. Cuza's regionalist group for Moldavian intellectuals—the Brotherhood of Unified Moldavia. Leading the Brotherhood's student center, he spoke in public about the United Principalities' 60th anniversary, expressing his sadness that this had not been celebrated as a national holiday in Iași.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
In July 1918, he married Florica Cernătescu, a university classmate. A native of Huși, her maternal grandfather was the chemist Petru Poni. Also trained by RainerRiga et al., pp.70, 180 and herself a decorated wartime physician, 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.Petrescu, p.372 Popa eventually followed Rainer to the University of Bucharest's medical faculty in 1920, and was appointed assistant professor. With Rainer as his doctoral advisor, Popa completed his docent degree, describing the functional structure of the dura mater.Riga et al., pp.382, 383, 384 Over the course of his career, his students included some twenty-two university professors and Romanian Academy members, among them George Emil PaladePetrovanu, p.23 "Recuperări. Jurnalul unui savant român în America", Ziarul Financiar, June 13, 2014 and Constantin Bălăceanu-Stolnici. Constantin Coroiu, "Un erou intelectual: Gr. T. Popa (I)" , Cultura, Nr. 396, November 2012
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.Constantinescu, "Grigore T. Popa și Victor Papilian...", passim 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".Constantinescu, "Grigore T. Popa și Victor Papilian...", p.39 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.Irina Livezeanu, Cultural Politics in Greater Romania. Cornell University Press, Ithaca, 2000, , p.258
With Rainer's help,Riga et al., pp.70, 383 Popa received a Rockefeller Foundation fellowship in 1925. He had a direct experience of America, and of what he liked to call its "guided democracy", Constantin Coroiu, "Un erou intelectual: Gr. T. Popa (II)" , Cultura, Nr. 397, November 2012 which was rare among Romanians of his generation, and which he recorded in detail in diaries he intended for publishing. He spent the first year in Chicago, the second at the Marine Biological Laboratory in Woods Hole and finishing by studying Anatomy and Embryology in 1927–1928 at University College Hospital Medical School, under Grafton Elliot Smith. His scientific activity, after his work on the dura mater, focused on three areas: the hypothalamic–pituitary–adrenal axis, the reform of medical education at the university level,Petrovanu, p.21 and the physiology of spontaneous movement (motility) in spermatozoa. 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) Regarding the first area, he worked in London alongside the Australian Una Fielding; together they discovered the vascular link between the hypothalamus and the pituitary gland, publishing their findings on the hypophyseal portal system in medical journals between 1930 and 1935, presenting them before the Royal Medical Society in 1935.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 Working alongside his Romanian colleague, Eugen Lucinescu, Popa also returned to anatomy with a study on the "mechanostructure" of the pericardium.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)
In 1928, Popa became professor of anatomy at Iași,Petrovanu, p.20 the city associated with his rivals. For many years he taught histology, Anatomical Pathology and Legal Medicine, as required,Petrovanu, p.22 and was also curator of Sfântul Spiridon Hospital, as well as head of the Physicians and Naturalists' Society. 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.Lucian Nastasă, Antisemitismul universitar în România (1919–1939). Editura Institutului pentru Studierea Problemelor Minorităților Naționale, Cluj-Napoca, 2011, , pp.427–429
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 clientelism and the excessive powers of the central government.Nastasă (2007), pp.292–293 On Washington's Birthday, 1932, he discussed "The Scientific Spirit in America and in Europe" at the Friends of America society in Bucharest."Rumania", in History of the George Washington Bicentennial Celebration. Foreign Participation. George Washington Bicentennial Commission, Washington, D. C., 1932, , p.421 An admirer of the British educational model, he was a research fellow at the University of Cambridge for four to six months a year in 1927–1930, 1932 and 1935–1938. He was also Romania's sole representative to the University of London Centennial, in 1936.
A corresponding member of the Romanian Academy from 1936, Membrii Academiei Române din 1866 până în prezent at the Romanian Academy site; Petrovanu, p.21 Grigore T. Popa was Dean of the Iași medical faculty for two years, from 1938 to 1940. At around that time, he drifted apart from his mentor Rainer, and relations between them became "tense".Bălăceanu-Stolnici, p.18; G. Brătescu, Ce-a fost să fie. Notații autobiografice. Humanitas, Bucharest, 2003, , p.105 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.Popa (1945), passim; Riga et al., pp.138, 383–384
Antifascism