On Victor Babes

Born in "Banatul Timisorii", Victor Babes (1854-1926), is considered to be not only the founder of modern medicine in Romania, but also a great scientist of the medical world, having studied medicine in Budapest and then in Vienna. He was assistant lecturer, docent, and Professor of Histopathology at The University of Medicine in Budapest (1881 - 1887), and Professor of Pathology and Bacteriology at the Faculty of Medicine in Bucharest (1887 - 1926). He attended graduate studies in München, Heidelberg, Strasbourg, Paris and Berlin. He set up, in 1887, The Institute of Pathology and Bacteriology in Bucharest, which was named after him. He also founded the  following publications: “The Annals of The Institute of Pathology and Bacteriology” (1889), “The Medical Romanian World” (1893) and “Archives of Medical Sciences” (1895). Victor Babes published about 1300 scientific works and articles. He founded, in 1900, The Anatomy Society of Bucharest. In addition, he founded, in 1888, the Center of Anti-rabic Vaccination, the  second in the world, after that founded by Louis Pasteur (1822-1895) in Paris. Victor Babes was a member of The Romanian Academy, of The Academy of Medicine of Paris, and of The International Committee for Leprosy Control. On three different occasions, he was awarded academic prizes, by The Academy of Sciences of Paris. He got the Montyon prize in 1886 and in 1924, and the Breant prize in 1913. He also became an officer of the French Legion of Honour.

The Romanian man of science was the founder of modern microbiology and he undertook essential, worldwide known investigations on the study of rabies, leprosy, diphtheria, tuberculosis, pellagra, malaria etc. He worked out the first Treatise on Bacteriology in the world :"Bacteria and their role in the anatomy and pathological histology of contagious diseases" (1885), co-written with French scientist André-Victor Cornil (1837-1908), a complete and systematic work of science, which was awarded the Montyon prize. He also identified in the cells of the brain of animals sick with rabies, the Babes-Negri diagnostics-relevant corpuscles. He discovered more than 50 new germs, which he studied and described. Of diagnostic value, they were to be named after him (Babeş-Negri bodies, babesia), pathogenic agents, which caused a rare and severe disease in animals called babesiosis (babesia bovis and babesia ovis). He discovered the importance of immune serum, able to inactivate germs, he stated the principle of passive immunization and he came up with an original method of anti-rabic immunization (associate therapy: vaccination and anti-rabic serum), known worldwide as “The Romanian Anti-rabic Method of Therapy” (1888). He was the promoter of the pathological morphology, on the infectious process, biomedical orientation based on the synthesis between bacteriology and pathological anatomy. The Romanian scientist developed a new model of a thermostat. He also forwarded a series of tinting methods for bacteria and mushrooms in cultures and histological cultures. He was the second scientist, after Louis Pasteur, to have studied the “vital competition” between the bacterial species, and to have introduced, for the first time ever, the antibiogram test. This method was immediately adopted by the Swiss scientist Karl Garsé, who used it in similar research studies of bacterial antagonism. In 1887, the German biologist Iulius Richard Petri (1852-1921) took over the same method, resulting in the Babes-Petri dish, used nowadays in all microbiology labs. It was also Victor Babes who stated the theoretical principle of antibiosis, which explained antagonism between microorganisms, on the basis of their producing by secretion of substances with inhibitory reciprocal action. Finding out that those substances could even stop the evolution of the species having produced them, he was the first one to launch the theory, which lies at the basis of the autoantibiosis principle.   

Last update: 2009