---
title: "Francisc Rainer"
chunk: 4/6
source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Francisc_Rainer"
category: "reference"
tags: "science, encyclopedia"
date_saved: "2026-05-05T04:03:18.807273+00:00"
instance: "kb-cron"
---

Rainer's views eventually placed him at odds with the emerging far-right and antisemitic movement of the 1920s. At a time when the Iași-based National-Christian Defense League (LANC), seeking to purge Jews from Romanian universities, was gaining momentum in Bucharest, a student identified Rainer as a Jew, and issued claims denying merit to his scholarship. According to Vitner, Rainer was the diametrical opposite of a Iași rival, the racist and LANC affiliate Nicolae Paulescu, who stood for "dark and backward scientism". Vitner also recalls that Rainer was even shot at by far-right affiliates, so that he would no longer popularize his "democratic convictions". For a while, Rainer was under the permanent protection of a Gendarme guard.
Nevertheless, Rainer was himself an active proponent of "hereditary determinism" and eugenics, which he understood as the cornerstone of social welfare policy. As he put it: "In the colorful mass of genes that carry those characteristics we inherit from our forerunners, one may find embedded [...] even our very destinies as men." A committed physiognomist, he believed that "only the phenotype may be influenced, to a certain extent, by our environment and our education." In June 1929, the newspaper Adevărul published one of Rainer's critical essays on the 1923 land reform. In it, Rainer claimed that the system of land reallocation had proved ignorant of eugenic and biopolitical principles. Nevertheless, as readers of his work suggests, Rainer helped preserve a balance in anthropology by also looking into environmental factors, thus questioning the ideological supremacy of scientific racism.
During the 1920s and early '30s, Rainer was often depressed, believing that his contribution to medical science was largely insignificant. He was also upset that various of his disciples, including Daniel Danielopolu, no longer acknowledged him in their own tracts about the "science of life", which seemed to him a case of plagiarism. He was dividing his time between Bucharest and the resort of Cheia, where he owned a small piece of property.
Subsequently, Rainer mainly focused on anthropological work and the popularization of anthropological science. Alongside sociologists such as Dimitrie Gusti, Henri H. Stahl, Sabin Manuilă, Mircea Vulcănescu, and Xenia Costa-Foru, he was present on the teaching staff of Veturia Manuilă's private school, where he gave lectures in anatomy to all-female classes preparing for a career in social services. Between 1928 and 1932, Rainer was also involved in Gusti's rural sociology project in the Carpathians. Joining the Gusti team as an anthropometrist, he earned kudos from the scientific community of his day with Enquêtes anthropologiques dans trois villages roumains des Carpathes ("Anthropological Queries in Three Romanian Villages of the Carpathians"). Published in 1937, it remains one of just four testimonials written by members of Gusti's team.
While on location in Nereju, Drăguș and Fundu Moldovei, he expanded the canon of anthropometry, and began recording blood type, investigated the presence and spread of syphilis, and provided free medical consultations to the peasants. Rainer and his specialist unit, including social hygienists, documented the squalid conditions of rural life. At Fundu Moldovei, where some of the villages were entirely cut off from the outside world, Rainer found that up to 50% of his samples showed contamination with syphilis, forcing him to distribute reserves of neosalvarsan. Stahl, who befriended Rainer in Fundu Moldovei, recalls that the stated purpose of Rainer's visit was an attempt to bridge physiology and sociology: "he did not yet see what that connection might be, but any research should be carried out rigorously, so that, who knows, another generation, more skilled than we are, might come along and use it."
Rainer's anthropometric work, which used for a permanent record peasant photographs, in large part taken by Milcu, remains a problematic aspect of Gustian sociology. As noted by cultural historian Z. Ornea (based on Stahl's recollections), Rainer "carried out unperturbed his anthropometric research, although he was not an adept of racial science and had no idea of what this anthropometry and blood chemistry [...] were going to be used for. And yet, the great professor of histology would return annually to the villages that were studied by the monographic teams and to carry out this research with no purpose and no finality." Anthropologist Vintilă Mihăilescu also notes that the combination of Gusti's sociology and Rainer's physical anthropology was a "domestic ethnology", "self-referential" and "biased", but nevertheless an "important tool" for later cultural anthropology.
Rainer also made frequent trips to Western Europe and the Balkans. He was in Sweden during 1930, attending the Physiological Congress as a Physical Education Institute delegate, and paying a visit to the Racial Biology Institute. In 1931 and again in 1933, he was in Greece together with sculptor Mac Constantinescu, gathering material about artistic depictions of humans in the Mycenaean period. In 1935, he lectured at the Romanian Atheneum on the links between Platonism and modern science, being introduced there by zoologist Constantin Kirițescu (one of several popularization conferences Rainer held at the Atheneum, Dalles Hall, and in various provincial cities). He kept his depression under control by taking trips to Turkey, and again to Greece, where he dedicated himself to the study of customs and classical art. Upon his return, Rainer opened his bone collection for the public, as a permanent museum, during the Bucharest International Congress of Anthropology and Prehistorical Archeology, 1937. It comprised some 6,000 bone relics and casts.

=== Final years ===