In Tirana, Refat Frashëri, bacteriologist, professor, participant of the National Renaissance Movement, passed away. He was born in Frashër in Përmet, in 1862. He attended the Galatasaray High School in Istanbul. He pursued higher studies at the University of Istanbul (1882–1887) and participated in the activities of the patriotic movement in the years of the League of Prizren (1878) and after. He started working as a doctor in the Shkodra Military Hospital (1888–1898), deputy director and later director of the Istanbul Bacteriological Institute and professor at the Faculty of Medicine in Istanbul (1899–1913). He saluted the Declaration of Independence (1912). In 1913, the Young Turks expelled him from the ranks of the Istanbul University professorship and exiled him to Tripoli, Lebanon, where he served as a quarantine doctor. In 1920 he was called by the government of the Congress of Lushnja (1920) and was appointed general director of Albanian Health; he remained in this position until 1931. He implemented for the first time (in the Military Hospital of Shkodra) vaccination against smallpox by means of the method of scraping with the crust of the wounds of smallpox patients and published the results of this vaccination in the Medical Journal of Istanbul. He published in the medical press of the time and in the Turkish Microbiology Treatise studies on the production of smallpox vaccine, tuberculosis vaccination, the filtering “microbe” (virus) that causes rabies, etc. His name became known beyond the borders of Turkey and Albania . (In the photo: Refat Frashëri)
Text: Albanian encyclopedic dictionary – Vol. 1 , Academy of Sciences of Albania, “Kristalina-KH”, Tirana, 2008, page 729.
Photo: © https://voal-online.ch/index.php?mod=article&cat=ALQIPTAR%C3%8BT&article=52669
Graphic processing: AHCF
