Career
She campaigned for an efficient preventive medicine, especially as an answer to the rising incidence of tuberculosis within large groups of the industrial worker population (as stated in her 1907 medical sociology work, Influenţa industriilor asupra sănătăţii lucrătorilor). At the same time, she demanded increased social security, and tried herself to improve conditions, mainly by creating the very first crèches in Romania. After the October Revolution, she became an enthusiastic supporter of the Bolshevik cause, opting to leave Romania for Bolshevist Russia in 1918.
Once there, after being received in the ranks of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, Ecaterina Arbore was integrated in the administrative structure of the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic, as Commissar for Health.
She returned to Romania briefly, in 1924, being swiftly expelled by the authorities. She became Health Commisar for the newly created Moldavian Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic, being one of the Romanian/Moldovan intellectuals who endorsed the terms of the Soviet policy towards the Romanian state.
This is the time when she was paid a visit by Romanian author Panait Istrati, during the latter"s revelatory journey to the Soviet lands (as described in his The Confession of a Loser). She was arrested during the Great Purge, and died in 1937 (it is not known whether this meant she was executed straight away, or whether her death was preceded by a stay in the Gulag).
She was rehabilitated by Soviet authorities during the De-Stalinization process, and by Romanian ones a while after the rise of Nicolae Ceauşescu, during the condemnation of Soviet policies in 1968 (she was exonerated together with most Romanian communist victims of Stalin"s purges).