Victor Săhleanu

Victor Aurelian Săhleanu (; 19 January 1924 – 26 August 1997) was a Romanian physician and anthropologist. He was a leading figure in anthropology in his country from the late 1960s until his death.

Biography

Education and early career Săhleanu was born in Gura Humorului, in the Bukovina region of the Kingdom of Romania. After finishing secondary school at the Aron Pumnul High School in Cernăuți, he entered the medical faculty of the University of Bucharest, from which he graduated in 1948. At that point, with the onset of the Communist regime, the institution became the Carol Davila University of Medicine and Pharmacy. Between 1944 and 1946, he took part-time courses at the literature and philosophy faculty as well, but did not earn a degree. In 1949, he became a doctor of medicine and surgery, with a thesis on "Considerations regarding Field Medicine". Ștefan-Marius Milcu presided over the doctoral committee, which also included Constantin Ion Parhon. He began working in hospitals while still a student, and during 1946, was a junior teaching assistant in the anatomical pathology department.

After graduation in 1948, he won a competition to become an intern at the Parhon-led endocrinology institute, where he was also a researcher from 1954 to 1961. He worked in endocrinology for a total of seventeen years, during which he founded the institute's morphopathology laboratory. From 1950 to 1952, he was a peer reviewer at the Milcu-led anthropology collective, a section of the endocrinology institute that was essentially a continuation of the Francisc Rainer-founded anthropology institute. In 1954, he signed up for part-time classes at the physics and mathematics faculty in Bucharest, graduating in 1961. He and his wife Zoe, a pediatrician, had two sons: Adrian George, who became a philologist and psychoanalyst; and Valentin, later an architect.

Săhleanu published over 2000 articles and 60 books, in fields that included methodology, medical psychology and psychoanalysis, ethics, aesthetics and the history of medicine and science. He was also an essayist and poet, publishing volumes in 1961, 1972, 1977 and 1997; and was among the founders of the Romanian Society of Writer and Journalist Physicians.

Alexandru Ofrim stated that Săhleanu wrote communist propaganda against erotic pleasure.