Vasile Voiculescu (1884-1963), besides being a well-known writer, was also a prominent, much respected physician who practiced between the two world wars. He attended the courses of the Faculty of Letters and Philosophy in Bucharest for a year (1902-1903), but gave up on them in order to attend the Faculty of Medicine. The literary debut took place in 1912 in the journal Convorbiri literare. He published the first volume of lyrical poems in 1916 and in 1918 he was granted the Academy Award for lyrical volume From the Aurochs Country and other poems. In 1935 he became a member of the Academy of Sciences of Romania and in 1941 he received the National Poetry Prize. The following volumes of poems are: Ripeness (1921), Poems with Angels (1927), Destiny (1933), Ascent (1937), Gleams (1939). His work also includes a short story: The Demiurge (1943). Shakespeare's last imaginative sonnets in Vasile Voiculescu’s translation (1964), and the novel Zahei-The blind (1966), Sentimental Gymnastics (1972) are published posthumously. The present article is aimed at revealing the world of Voiculescu’s short stories.
Physicians have represented a long time the main transmitters of knowledge as they were real scholars. If Renaissance promoted the study of the human body anatomy and physiology, the next step made by practitioners of medicine was to spread the enlightenment. That meant the shift of the very purpose of their profession: from passive opposition to ailments towards an active involvement into the lives of the impoverished. In order to change the odds in the battle against diseases, physicians had the great burden to enlarge the cultural horizons of those whose health was in their hands. Therefore, one way of imparting knowledge was by publishing and spreading their attainments to the general public in a comprehensible way. Once people gained awareness of the dangers entailed by bad hygiene, the physicians’ role in society switched towards more cultural realms. At the beginning of the 20th century health care professionals achieved the next step in the becoming of medicine: setting up a new science to link humanities with pure science. In Romania, the main promoters of this new border science were Victor Gomoiu and Valeriu Bologa and they co-opted other intellectuals.
The ancient Greek medicine was based on the principle that philosophy influences all natural sciences as a whole. The doctor had, first of all, a humanistic formation followed by study of applied sciences specific to medicine. If humanism is purely theoretical, medicine is an applied science and the two-philosophy and medical knowledge, despite the apparent antinomy are able to create a union to the benefit of humanity. Medicine is the art of treating patients, identifying diseases and malady prevention. In its endeavor, medicine is based on the findings of numerous other fields such as physics, chemistry, anatomy, physiology, etc. Philosophy, on the other hand, can be defined as an attempt to understand human life as a whole. It is inevitable that the two ways of dealing with human beings to have influenced each other and the history of mankind. Both forms of knowledge have a major impact and influence on the world. Philosophy, understood in its older meaning, urged towards the prophylaxis and treatment of diseases of the soul whereas medicine, relying on philosophical teachings is aimed at healing the body and study its psychosomatic features.
