My letter to the medical community of Oradea, 2016.
Dr. Alexandru (Sandy) Dobjanschi was my first cousin, the son of one of my motherly aunts, Rózsi, and the great-great grandson of a Polish general, who had to flee Poland after the 1848 Polish revolution.
Dr. Alexandru Dobjanschi received his medical doctor’s diploma in 1949 at the Carol Davila University of Medicine and Pharmacy in Bucharest, Romania. The University was first established in 1857 under the name National School of Medicine and Pharmacy by the French expatriate physician, Carol Davila. In 1869 it was incorporated as a department in the newly created University of Bucharest. The first doctoral degrees were granted in 1873, and the doctoral degree became the de facto graduation in 1888.
By 1953 Dr. Dobjanschi had been specialized as a surgeon and worked at the General County Hospital in Oradea.
At that time anesthesia, as we know it today did not exist in Romania. Surgeons operated on patients using local anesthesia, and in rare cases under general anesthesia by ether inhalation. Local anesthesia was effective only for minor interventions, and ether inhalation was unreliable and dangerous. Often the quiet of the operation rooms was interrupted by the patients crying out in pain, like we’ve seen it repeatedly in movies depicting Civil War surgeries.
Dr. Dobjanschi possessed a high level of empathy, both as a man and as a surgeon, and strongly felt that there had to be a better way than subjecting his patients to unbearable pain, reminiscent of vivisections of the Middle Ages.
In his quest to alleviate the pain felt by his patients during surgery, he invented anesthesia by intubation and controlled administration of sedatives. At that time barbiturates were available on a controlled basis for medical purposes in Romania, and, beginning in 1953, Dr. Dobjanschi consecrated all his free time and energy to the study of the effects of barbiturates on humans and in inventing, designing, fabricating, perfecting, testing and using his anesthesia apparatus.
It was a long way; he had spent all his free time at the hospital laboratory, and later at the hospital mechanical shop, where he fabricated a working anesthesia machine. He had to learn to work the lathe and milling machines, he had to search all possible sources and sites for materials suitable to his project.
At that time in the socialist Romania metals like bronze, copper and aluminum were controlled substances and as such were not available at your local hardware store. Dr. Dobjanschi had to use all his connections and favors to obtain such materials, mostly from the military. I remember, he had used a 155 mm spent WW II howitzer shell as desiccant reservoir, and a basketball inner tube for ventilator buffer, obviously after properly sterilizing them. As needle valves and pressure regulators were also nowhere to find, he had to machine them out of bronze on the lathe.
Once the anesthesia machine was ready and functioning, came the long and tedious work of testing and calibration. About two years of experiments followed, on dogs: most of them survived, some of them had given their life for learning and gaining knowledge, with the end goal of stopping human pain and suffering during surgical operations.
I remember the day when Dr. Dobjanschi went to the hospital where his anesthesia machine would be first used on a human patient. I have never seen him so focused and so confident: he knew the first surgery in Romania under total anesthesia would be successful; the patient will feel no pain and will wake up well after the surgery.
Of course, the entire family were holding our breaths and quietly praying for everything to go well. It was one of the longest days of my life, and when the phone call came from the hospital, telling that everything went all right, the patient felt no pain and came through well, we all felt relief and cheered for Sandy’s enormous achievement.
A year later, in 1956 it was Dr. Dobjanschi who created the first intensive care and reanimation section in Romania, at the same General County Hospital in Oradea, where he had practiced anesthesia and headed the intensive care and reanimation section until he passed away in 2002. Dr. Dobjanschi’s achievement had been recognized by the Romanian government; he was induced in the Romanian Society of Anesthesia and Intensive Care as one of its founding members and continued scientific activity and research within that organization
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