Cosmic Multicultural Bucharest in the Pandemic (117):
Microscopic Astronomy
By Andrei Dorian Gheorghe (astro-photo-poem-essay) and Florin Alexandru Stancu (design)
On November 11, 2020
I photographed the planet Mars through my camera, a real small telescope thanks to its “zoom”, and I thought of H. G. Wells’ famous fiction “The War of the Worlds” (1898) in which terrestrial pathogens saved humanity from the Martian invaders.
But in 2020 we were living in a real pandemic in which a terrestrial virus really threatened humanity, sentenced to urgently find a life-saving vaccine through its best specialists in this field.
To be close to this theme, on November 13, 2020
I walked along the banks of the Dambovita River to see three somewhat related medical buildings made in the 1890s in the spirit of French architectural school (all of them with solar symbols, the last building with Neo-Romanian elements):
the Faculty of Biology (I wish it a future class of astrobiology),
the Institute of Pathology and Bacteriology (now Biomedicine)
and the Faculty of Veterinary Medicine (I wish it a future class dedicated to the pets in spaceships),
in which people studies forms of the Universe using not telescopes, but microscopes.
I insisted on the second building (made by a French-Swiss architect), which is named after Victor Babes (1854-1915), “the second rabiologist in the world” after Louis Pasteur, “the father of serotherapy” and a “precursor to modern immunology”.
Victor Babes was also the Romanian doctor who published the first treatise of bacteriology in the world, “Bacteria and their role in pathological anatomy and histology of infectious diseases” in 1895 in France (with the French doctor Victor André Cornil as co-author).
Victor Babes, a genius
whose medical work has helped so many people
to continue to exercise their right
to see the healthy colors
given by sunlight.
#poetry