The Genealogical Aura of the Davila Family

Abstract

One of the long-lasting narratives developed around a family involved in the establishment of Romanian modernity in the 19th and 20th centuries is that of the illustrious physician Carol Davila. Of uncertain descent, most likely abandoned at birth and adopted by an Italian family from which he takes his name with heraldic-ornithological resonance (d’Avila), the founder of the Romanian school of medicine invents a fantasy family genealogy, combining famous European biographies, memory lapses, and Romantic melodrama. This illegitimate legacy will leave its mark on the activities of the next generation, on the one hand, enabling a calling to implement Western ideas in Romanian institutions and, on the other, stimulating a quasi-patriarchal cult for memory constructs, equivalent to the fabrication of what Paul Ricoeur called “a prior real”. This paper aims to look at the ways in which an identity complex remains engraved in public and private acts of memory.