A MISTERY OF THE ROMANIAN LITERARY HISTORY: TUDOR ARGHEZI DISEASE

Abstract

The Romanian poet Tudor Arghezi has always had a negative attitude towards doctors and their job. The poet's reluctance resulted from a mysterious disease that almost cost him his life in 1939. Following the diagnosis made by several Romanian medical celebrities, his death seemed inevitable and would be caused by cancer, as most of the doctors said. The condition of the famous patient remained a mystery to experts; Dr. John Fagarasanu tried to diagnose the affliction accurately and gave it the name "Tudor Arghezi disease", but it has never been recognized officially. The poet has made a full recovery, surprising all the specialists, and continued to write, having a long-lasting career in literature and press. His cure came from a healer, Dumitru Grigoriu-Arges, who administered him a misterious injection.

Headnote

Abstract: The Romanian poet Tudor Arghezi has always had a negative attitude towards doctors and their job. The poet's reluctance resulted from a mysterious disease that almost cost him his life in 1939. Following the diagnosis made by several Romanian medical celebrities, his death seemed inevitable and would be caused by cancer, as most of the doctors said. The condition of the famous patient remained a mystery to experts; Dr. John Fagarasanu tried to diagnose the affliction accurately and gave it the name "Tudor Arghezi disease", but it has never been recognized officially. The poet has made a full recovery, surprising all the specialists, and continued to write, having a long-lasting career in literature and press. His cure came from a healer, Dumitru Grigoriu-Arges, who administered him a misterious injection.

Keywords: Tudor Arghezi, Romanian literature, literary history, diseases writers.

Tudor Arghezi's life, even though it was a long one and marked by 71 years of diligent writing both in literature and press, had several dramatic episodes. One of them was a mysterious disease that suddenly confined the poet to bed in 1939. Despite the efforts of numerous Romanian renowned physicians, the poet's death seemed inevitable. The disease he was suffering from was rare, which led Dr. Ion Fagarasanu to propose (unsuccessfully though) in 1971 at an international congress of surgery that the disease should be named after the illustrious patient.

The famous doctor Dumitru Bagdasar estimated then that Tudor Arghezi had only one month to live, advising the poet's relatives and friends, among whom was Alexander Rosetti, to give the poet's manuscripts for publication to a publishing house as the poet's end was inevitable1. Arghezi had consulted all the renowned Romanian physicians but without good results. Only the morphine injections relieved the excruciating pain the patient was experiencing.

Despite the doctors' pessimism, he was miraculously healed, contradicting all expectations. Even if the unconventional cure was obtained with a less common and contested treatment, Arghezi did not admit that the treatment he received from doctors was beneficial. He always claimed to have been cured by a healer whose name was Dumitru Grigoriu-Arges, who used intramuscular miraculous bee venom that would have cured thousands of patients, as told by Grigoriu-Arges himself. The poet later testified that he saw himself a register in which his savior wrote the names of the patients he had healed using the controversial method. This mysterious doctor that practiced medicine in a hospital in Curtea de Arges City was recommended to Arghezi by a friend, the film director, Soare Z. Soare.

The way Tudor Arghezi describes this doctor confirms the controversies that surrounded the practice of Grigoriu-Arges: the physician comes quickly to the poets' house located in the slum of Marmor, in Bucharest, to see Arghezi, who had been confined to bed for some time by a terrible ailment. Those that saw the doctor were astonished by Grigoriu-Arges's appearance. He was a tall man, with red beard and a yellow mantle, a blue coat, a green waistcoat and colourful pant. Even his shoes had different colours 2. However, Tudor Arghezi's life hung by a thread. Although he believed that Grigoriu-Arges was mad, he had no choice but to accept the odd healer. He immediately gives him an injection containing a mysterious combination of substances and urges his patient to get up. The miracle happened and Arghezi was back on his feet.

He strongly deprecated the practice of medicine and the doctors' job, saying that they were nothing else but "medical beasts". His repugnance went so far that Arghezi wrote a play called The Syringe during his detention at Târgu-Jiu, in 1943. Moreover, together with the director Paul Calinescu, Arghezi also wrote a screenplay for a movie (Hidden Weaknesses3 ) which he envisioned as a sequel of The Syringe. In this screenplay doctors were also main characters. The poet wanted to present the hidden weaknesses of some people that didn't respect their job, doctors being among those he criticized most. During his convalescence, Arghezi was supported financially by the big industrialist Nicolae Malaxa. In an interview4, the renowned physician George Emil Palade admitted that he was the one who kept the connection between Arghezi and Malaxa.

The doctors who examined Arghezi at the time argued that the patient had had another disease four years earlier, in 19355. Two of the doctors who treated him in 1939, D. Bagdasar and G.E. Palade, the latter being at the beginning of his career then, became the main targets of the ironies in Arghezi's literature and articles. But even if he was healed by a controversial practitioner, after 16 years the patient suffered a relapse from the same disease, in 1955. Meanwhile, Dr. D. Bagdasar died, but after some analyses Dr. Ion Fagarasanu proved that the renowned neurosurgeon Dumitru Bagdasar was right in 1939, when he made a diagnosis in Tudor Arghezi's case. The Romanian poet had a benign tumour, not a malignant tumour, as many specialists said. His disease was in fact a pus that led to a paralysis at the level of his backbone.

Doctors discovered that the treatment applied by Dr. Dumitru Bagdasar was actually the remedy of Arghezi's disease, Grigoriu-Arges taking advantage of the delayed effect of the treatment prescribed by the neurosurgeon. Grigoriu-Arges' injections had only a placebo effect on the patient, but supported the theory that he discovered a miraculous treatment. However, doctors regained Arghezi's confidence in 1959, when the same "medical beasts" saved his wife's life.

Whether he gave to his patient a real medicine or only one with a placebo effect, the practitioner Grigoriu-Arges, an eccentric physician (he also published scientific articles and even a brochure in 1937) helped him recover from a simple sciatica and not from cancer, a disease with which Tudor Arghezi had been diagnosed by many renowned physicians. His recovery was probably a result of the unconditional trust the patient had in him. However, Dumitru Grigoriu was not an amateur in the field of medicine, working as a doctor at the hospital from Curtea de Arges. Besides the legend according to which he managed to heal an impressive number of patients using this secret method, he introduced as a treatment in medicine a special mixture which was not miraculous in terms of its active ingredients, but only in terms of the proportion in which each substance was dosed. It's worth mentioning that he wrote in an article 6, published in 1932, seven years before he healed Tudor Arghezi, that the new mixture should be used in a clinic to treat the patients that suffered from sciatica, so that he could test and eventually patent his product for widespread use.

The hypochondriac Tudor Arghezi

Arghezi has always been a hypochondriac. In the letters7 he sent to the young teacher Aretia Panaitescu when he was a monk at Cernica Monastery, he complained of terrible migraines, being, as he wrote it, even near death. Arghezi describes in the letters he sent to his friend, Gala Galaction, the terrible headaches he experienced, the pain being afterwards localized in his spinal column. It was the pain which led to a life-threatening disease later, in 1939. The poet even opened a case against doctors from the Faculty of Medicine in Bucharest and obtained an 18-month suspension of Dumitru Bagdasar. Tudor Arghezi even asked for compensation for the 18 months of inactivity during which he could not honor contracts with some publishers.

The Romanian poet did not have the fate of a genius who dies young. He lived 87 years, although he was an inveterate smoker who could not give up cigarettes until the last days of his life. In his youth he was convinced that he would not live long. In some letters the young poet even described how, at the monastery, being close to death, he was given the last Eucharist.

The disease Tudor Arghezi suffered from left traces in his poetry. Nicolae Manolescu8 mentions the poems Scorching Ashes, The Buffalo of Fire and A Beast has Fallen Asleep, from the volume One Hundred and One Poems, published in 1947. These poems are similar to the prayer of a dying man, being full of funerary symbolism. The same symbolism is also found in his youth poems, from Black Agate series of poems. The difference is that death is now felt at a physiological and empirical level:

"My mouth is like a scorched crust

And my slobber tastes like souse

My tongue is like a rub stone to sharpen a scythe

The walls, beams and my house fell on me

They all become my coffin.

A latch breaks my body, a staple tears me

I have broken locks in my throat.

I am wrapped in a chain of dead nails"

(Scorching Ashes)

As a sign of the inevitable death, the inner being and the outer universe are mingled, invading the body that is still alive. This is the same domestic environment in which life and love were once harmoniously interwoven, in his youth poetry:

"You sneaked inside me with your song

That afternoon, when

The lock of my soul's window, no longer strong,

Opened wide in the wind,

And your music I heard, without knowing.

Your song filled the whole place,

Its drawers, boxes and carpets

Like melodic lavender sachets. See,

The latches have been blown away,

And my monastery is left exposed, in disarray.

..........

The clouds crushed too, with the thunder

Inside the universe that I had kept secluded."

(Morgenstimmung)

Such poems related to death are full of religious and thanatic symbols: "church", "bell", "goat" (which symbolises the Devil), "buffalo" (an animal which is believed to lead the souls of the dead).

Conclusion

Tudor Arghezi disease was not recognized and named after the Romanian poet's name but this biographical dramatic episode he has gone through was an important moment in the history of Romanian medicine, challenging the mind of the best physicians in our country. Because of the terrible pain he endured in 1939, Tudor Arghezi was close to death. The mysterious disease started suddenly and ended the same way, without any logical explanation, after he was given an injection that presumably contained bee venom. Besides his physical suffering, the disease left traces in Tudor Arghezi's literature both in his youth and later.

These new aspects of the Arghezian literature were studied in the past by many specialists in literary history, linguistics and medicine. Among them we can mention Nicolae Manolescu Alexandru Rosetti, C.D. Zeletin and G. Bratescu. Their research is far from being comprehensive on the subject, literary critic Nicolae Manolescu (in his book Critical History of Romanian literature. 5 Centuries of Literature) making a short analysis of how "Tudor Arghezi disease" was reflected in his poetry. In addition, in 1982 Barbu Cioculescu publishes numerous letters sent by Tudor Arghezi, in which the poet makes many confessions to Gala Galaction and describes the terrible effect that the diseases he suffered from had on him. The numerous implications that "Tudor Arghezi disease" had for the poet's writings and even for Romanian literature deserve a thorough research, especially by studying the way in which his literature has changed over time.

Footnote

1 Alexandru Rosetti, Travels and portraits, Sport-Tourism Publishing House, Bucharest, 1977, p. 204.

2 Ibidem, p. 205.

3 Ibidem, p. 205.

4 C.D. Zeletin, With George Emil Palade in San Diego, talking about «Tudor Arghezi» disease, in Literary Romania, no. 50, December 19-25, 2001, pp. 12-13.

5 On this subject also in C.D. Zeletin, With George Emil Palade in San Diego, talking about «Tudor Arghezi» disease, in Literary Romania, no. 50, December 19-25, 2001, pp. 12-13.

6 Dumitru Grigoriu-Arges, A new treatment characteristic to sciatic neuralgia, in Medical Bucharest, no. 1, 1932, pp. 5-6, apud G. Bratescu, Healthcare yesterday and nowadays, Medical Publishing House, Bucharest, 1984.

7 Published in Barbu Cioculescu, Tudor Arghezi: Self-portrait in letters, Eminescu Publishing House, Bucharest, 1982.

8 Nicolae Manolescu, Critical History of Romanian Literature. 5 Centuries of Literature, Paralela 45 Publishing House, Pitesti, 2008, p. 629.

References

REFERENCES

*An Arghezian movie script, August 1967, in Arges, II, no. 8, p. 67.

Bratescu, G., (1984), Healthcare yesterday and nowadays, Bucharest, Medical Publishing House.

Cioculescu, Barbu, (1982), Tudor Arghezi: Self-portrait in letters, Bucharest, Eminescu Publishing House.

Manolescu, Nicolae, (2008), Critical History of Romanian Literature. 5 Centuries of Literature, Pitesti, Paralela 45 Publishing House.

Rosetti, Alexandru, (1977), Travels and portraits, Bucharest, Sport-Tourism Publishing House.

Zeletin, C.D., December 19-25, (2001), With George Emil Palade in San Diego, talking about «Tudor Arghezi» disease, in Literary Romania, no. 50.