New presentation by Lidia Trăușan-Matu

On 14 December 2023, Lidia Trăușan-Matu will give a talk during a monthly meeting of GRIPS, a research group hosted by NEC. Lidia’s paper is entitled “Sănătate și societate. Doctorul Iuliu Barasch și sistemul carantinelor din Țara Românească între 1830 și 1863” (“Health and Society. Doctor Iuliu Barasch and the Quarantine System in Wallachia between 1830 and 1863”. Towards the end of 1829, against the backdrop of the horrors caused by the plague in Romanian society and the panic that preceded its appearance, the Russian General Pavel Kiseleff, Governor of the Principalities between 1829 and 1834, decided to implement Article 6 of the Adrianople Peace Treaty. This allowed Wallachia and Moldavia to organize quarantines and permanent sanitary corridors “along the Danube and elsewhere in the country where they may be needed” as a deterrent against plague and cholera epidemics from the East and Asia. With the help of the writings of Dr. Iuliu Barasch, a quarantine doctor in Călărași between 1843-1845, Lidia Trăușan-Matu aims to describe how the Danube quarantine system of Wallachia worked, according to what model/model it was set up and what functions it fulfilled, where the quarantines were located, what they looked like and who worked in them, what it was like to live in a quarantine for a while and what concerned the people isolated in them. In addition to the work of Iuliu Barasch, the author draws on a range of published and unpublished sources, including mortality lists, medical reports, and articles from the press of the time.