The AOSR Medical Section is sad and sheds a tear at the catafalque of a great Romanian, Professor Dr. N. Constantinescu.
As a member of the AOSR and at the same time of the Academy of Medical Sciences, the two sisters founded by the same father, Professor Dr. C. Angelescu, it is up to us, our colleagues, to set up an infusion for posterity and to make the veins of future generations, of today’s youth, to flow drops of “PERFUTIONS CONTA FORGETTING”. Generations of physicians know Professor Nae Constantinescu as the author of treatises on Surgical Anatomy, or in a broader sense Clinical Anatomy, because we have sacralized the idea that “Anatomie fundamentum medicinnae est”, and he has worked all his life, even in the present-recent era, on a monumental treatise on this miracle of divine creation, the human body, seen through the eyes of surgeons, of clinicians.
He fought for the introduction of the subject of Clinical Anatomy in medical faculties. At the same time he was a surgeon by vocation, most Romanians know him for his image as an operator at Colțea, where he worked since the 1980s and where they found him on duty, tirelessly, for nights in a row in 1989, saving the shot or wounded of the revolution.
At Colțea, the oldest Romanian hospital (320 years old), in University Square, dozens of wounded were hospitalized and the first sacrifices of innocent young people were made. It was precisely here at Colțea, in Surgery, where Romanian surgery was born through its fathers and its choirmasters, N.Kretulescu, N.Turnescu, Severeanu, Toma Ionescu, N. Hortolomei (almost all of them were called Nicolae, like him), N. Constantinescu was a good Romanian and a faithful man, as if by heavenly providence, his doctoral thesis entitled “On the biology of rib transplantation”, the surgical harvesting of a rib being the only surgical intervention divinely performed, at creation, Professor Constantinescu’s surgical work includes over 8000 interventions, and his scientific work is extremely rich, addressing modern topics, among which I would mention one of world renown: “Demonstration of the aqngiogenic capacity of stem cells from the adult red bone marrow” (paper presented at the World Congress of Cytochemistry and Histochemistry in 1976, appreciated in Paris by Prof. Duhamel, in Munich by Prof. Begemann, in the USA by W.Blount and H. Boyd.
In 1999 I had the opportunity to see him honored by the great luminaries of the medical world in California and around the world, including G. Emil Palade, in Los Angeles, where, as a man of the city, he also held the position of Consul of Romania in the western USA. But together with 6 Nobel Prize laureates at the same meeting, he was appreciated, of course, not as a politician or Consul, but as a great researcher of the cellular world. Medical students love his anatomy with its clinical and surgical valences, bequeathed by him, we surgeons consider him a heritage asset, the eminesciologists are happy for what he wrote about the sufferings of Eminesci, our academy cherishes him as one of its luminous figures, UMF Carol Davila loves him for the tenacity with which he still worked in Anatomy at over 85 years of age to finish his great treatise on Clinical Anatomy.
You know that we all loved you and will never forget you.
Lord, protect the Romanians!
21.01.2025
Prof. V. SÂRBU, President of the Medical Section of AOSR