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AboutMost autobiographies by nature end up being tedious, menial, self-serving, and ultimately uninteresting. I offer to you instead a biography of a famous Romanian personality in the field of human pathology forensics: NICOLAE MINOVICI (1868-1941) Professor Nicolae Minovici was the brother and closest colleague of Mina Minovici, one of the most important figures in Romania in forensics and legal medicine. In Cluj, Romania Nicolae created a legal medicine school. Upon obtaining a professor position at the new (at that time) Romanian Faculty of Medicine, Nicolae Minovici was already known as an authority in this specialty due to his prodigious activity (for instance in 1912 in Rome at the International Social Hygiene Exposition he won the gold medal for the system of post-mortem photography). The topic of his PhD dissertation was "The Tattoos in Romania," a premiere in the Romanian legal medicine literature in which he underlined the importance of tattoos in legal medicine practice and for identification purposes. Between 1919-1932 in Cluj he published many papers about post-mortem autolysis, alcoholism, congenital heart anomalies, legal medical osteology including a remarkable monograph about the autopsy techniques in legal medicine practice (1924). His self-experimentation with the death mechanism in hanging is famous worldwide. In 1904 he hung himself many times for 6 to 10 seconds (the longest hanging was for 25 seconds). He described the symptoms that precede death in these circumstances. His experiments and conclusions were accepted by the whole medical world and quoted in foreign legal medical treatises (e.g. Lacassagne and Bockarius reproduced the complete text and all his pictures in their treatises). In 1936 N. Minovici created the first structure of the Romanian Society of Legal Medicine (which he named "The Legal Medical Doctors Association") and also the Journal of Legal Medicine, one of the first periodical publications in this field that would be published quarterly until the beginning of the World War II in 1940. In 1937 N. Minovici and professor Francisc Rainer were the principal organizers of the 12th International Congress of Anthropology in Bucharest. Furthermore N. Minovici is considered the founder of the first emergency system in Bucharest in 1906 and of the Emergency Hospital in 1936. |