I don't know who else might be interested in reading a CV except those forced by their own job, today being included in the HR department of any respectable-sized company.

Even less a professional career path of a doctor, inevitably constrained to the obligatory stages of high school-college-residency-postgraduate courses-participation in congresses-published works. However, we live in a society where information has exceeded capital in value, a world of changes in all structures, a world where it seems more important to introduce yourself than to know yourself. A CV is a personal presentation and this one is no exception, I just dared to modify its standardized form.

My name is Rubin Munteanu and I was born on December 14, 1969 in Tg-Mures. I attended the first two grades in this city after which I “emigrated” to Focsani, where I graduated from Al. Ioan Cuza High School, mathematics-physics profile. I returned to my hometown to attend college and in 1995 I managed to pass the Bachelor’s Exam and become a doctor-physician, as it is written on the beautiful sheet of paper that attests to my efforts for 6 years.

I am often asked if I am Transylvanian or Moldavian (more because of some reminiscences of the accents I still possess than for reasons of curricular revelations). I invariably answer that I am Romanian, since my mother was born in Tg-Mureş (it is true that she has ascendants in Oltenia and Muntenia) and my father is Moldavian (his presence in Tg-Mureş is also due to the Faculty of Medicine) and I (although born in Transylvania) spent a good part of my formative years in Focșani, a city interesting for its people, located on the border of Wallachian-Moldavian mentalities. I learned many things in this city, I attended a serious high school where I had the chance to be part of a class where competitiveness was the supreme value. Coincidentally, Focșani was also the place where I discovered firsthand that what Hasek writes in his famous novel “The Adventures of the Brave Soldier Svejk” is true.

I feel the need to say a few more things about the University of Medicine and Pharmacy TgMures in those years after the Revolution. Although it was a turbulent historical period, the University preserved many of the values ​​that had established it as one of the best schools in the country. After the moments of the Romanian-Hungarian conflict in the spring of 1990, both the teaching staff and the students returned to study, with the deep conviction that they did not actually have to leave there.

At least that's how it happened to me, who experienced the only union activity of my life that spring, within the Students' League. I quickly withdrew and healed myself, I hope permanently, of something I was not made for. This is not the place to write more about the history of this faculty, but I can mention, briefly, that it is the result of a merger between two great medical schools, on the one hand, in the 60s exceptional doctors came from Cluj who became great Professors (they were all students of the golden generation of the Cluj University), and on the other hand, there were Hungarian Professors who came, more or less directly, from the faculties of Budapest and Vienna.

The next stage of my life took place in Bucharest (and since then everything else has been linked to this city). In the year I graduated from college, it was decided that the internship was still unnecessary (there were rarely two years in a row with the same rules) and I was allowed to take the residency exam. Having managed to get a good position in this difficult exam, I was faced with a harder choice than when I finished high school. Why? Because I always knew that I wanted to do medicine (it was also my desire, but especially the merit of my parents, who guided both my brother and me towards this profession), while at the end of college I didn't really know what specialization I wanted. I chose obstetrics-gynecology for three reasons: because it is one of the few specializations where you also have healthy and happy patients, because it combines both medical and surgical aspects (internal medicine was my favorite field in college) and especially because my professor at the college (Mr. Professor Costică Rădulescu) led me to believe that it is the most beautiful medical specialty.

However, I started my residency with a general surgery internship and, absolutely by chance, I ended up at the General Surgery Clinic at St. John's Hospital, led by Professor Corneliu Dragomirescu. The Professor's personality, the extraordinary atmosphere he created in the Clinic, and the modern vision of laparoscopic surgery, which was then in its infancy, fascinated me. I gave up gynecology and changed my specialization profile, becoming a general surgery specialist in 2000. Professor Corneliu Dragomirescu created the best laparoscopic surgery school in Romania, with incredibly few material resources. All the more so, his success is both surprising and valuable. It was also thanks to my Professor that I became a university assistant at the Department of Surgery of the Faculty of Dental Medicine at the Carol Davila University of Medicine and Pharmacy.

Unfortunately, Professor Corneliu Dragomirescu passed away in October 2016. I learned a lot from him, both surgical and non-surgical. He used to say that science without conscience is not worth much, and today's times prove him right more than ever.

Returning to my personal curriculum, I consider the rest of the stages to be just a natural consequence of this start. I have been to dozens of congresses and courses in the country and abroad (and I continue to go), both as a simple participant and sometimes as a speaker, I have been the author or co-author of many articles or chapters in specialized books. I am proud of some of them, less so of most. However, I never stop striving to stay connected to all the progress in my fields of interest.

In parallel with the theoretical side, I have evolved along the path of surgical practice. I believe that the surgeon's place is primarily at the patient's bedside and in the operating room, which for me was and remains a special place. I opened my eyes to surgery at the dawn of the development of laparoscopic surgery and I am as in love with it as I was on the first day. I think there are few laparoscopic procedures that I have not practiced, but there are certainly some that are my favorites: colorectal surgery, upper gastric pole approach, parietal surgery, but also the genital sphere. For almost 20 years, I have entered with great enthusiasm the new discipline of bariatric and metabolic surgery. Fascinating field. It does not mean that I have not also approached classical surgery. After all, surgery is unitary, the laparoscopic, robotic or classical approach being consecutive to the most important act in surgery, namely the decision to intervene or abstain. As I summarized at some point, the decision is more important than the incision.

The last surgical challenge is deep endometriosis. Complex cases of endometriosis, with genital and digestive involvement, require a multidisciplinary medical team. The partnership established a few years ago with Prof. Elvira Brătilă has worked even better than I dared to hope. Today we are talking about EndoCare Academy, a successful project that brings together two teams.

Another side of my activity was, at some point, medical management. From February 2012 to July 2016, I was appointed medical director at the Euroclinic Regina Maria Hospital and I began to read, delve deeper and participate in congresses on this topic, without ever ceasing to remain first and foremost a surgeon.

For a long time I worked at both the state and private hospitals (i.e. St. John's Hospital and Euroclinic Hospital), letting my patients choose where they wanted to be treated. Since February 2015 I have given up the public hospital (and at the same time the quality of university assistant) and I have chosen to do only surgery. From September 2016 until January 2023 I have worked only at Memorial Hospital, thus giving up with relief (I feel that I have achieved what I had set out to do) the administrative obligations that arose from the position of medical director.

The beginning of 2023 meant a new change because I decided to join the Memorial Hospital team. The compatibility of medical principles determined this decision so that I experience (once again) the excitement of a new path.

In all these years I have had the joy of participating in the training of good and very good surgeons and the fact that they consider me their mentor gives me the right to say that they were my students. In all these years, I have wanted, strived and succeeded in creating a medical team with which to practice surgery at current standards. And because everything must have a name, the team is called BariClinic.

Traditionally, CVs only talk about achievements and leave the failures in the shadows and between the lines. They are therefore only half true. Not being a conventional CV, I understand adding the minuses. I have not succeeded in everything I have set out to do so far, not completing my doctoral thesis and not delving into some research directions are just two examples.

The final one belongs to the extra-professional field, to non-surgical passions. I really have only one outside of medicine and it is related to books: modern history and memoirist literature lead me to a better understanding of the world.