Trained as a pathologist, he established his reputation as a popularizer of conventional and alternative medicine (primarily hydrotherapy), putting out the influential magazine Medicul Poporului.

Sterian was a marginal ally of the Symbolist movement, to which his uncle Mircea Demetriade belonged; he had a longstanding friendship with poets Alexandru and Pavel Macedonski.

These caused a lasting scandal for their challenging of ancestral taboos—although, overall, Sterian remained a conservative and an avowed Christian, who claimed to have found a cure for compulsive masturbation.

A Colonel in the Romanian Land Forces, Sterian was also an expert of typhus, having taken part in the World War I campaign against epidemics, and managing to survive that disease.

[1] During the early years of the Romanian Kingdom, Eraclie left Galați and moved with his family to Craiova, where he would later graduate from Carol I National College,[1] in the same class as mathematician Gheorghe Țițeica.

He was active in the Blue Ward of Bucharest, alongside Demetriade; in February 1906, they both issued a call for reunification between the Conservative mainstream and the Junimea splinter group, noting that the latter has absorbed some of the most talented cadres (including Petre P. Carp and Alexandru Marghiloman).

In a March 1907 satire, George Ranetti proposed that Sterian's quarrel with the Transylvanians was inspired by Macedonski—since immigrants from that region were least likely to embrace, or even condone, the "decadent" school.

During the Bosnian crisis of 1908, he addressed the crowds at Dacia Hall to protest against Austria-Hungary and the Triple Alliance; in that context, he called for the Duchy of Bukovina to be annexed by Romania.

[12] Popular with the regular public, such works were found unpalatable by Christian critics, who objected in particular to Sterian's claim that sexual refinement was one of "the holy ancestral values".

[29] The Greek-Catholic intellectual Teofil A. Bălibanu, who read Educația sexelor in high school, called it "a diabolic work", alleging that "tens of thousands of young men and women" had been driven astray by Sterian.

[30] Doctor Ștefan Irimescu dismissed Sterian as a profiteer, noting that the sexology books, rich in "tiny disgusting details", "excite the morbid curiosity of his various readers".

[36] Irimescu, as head physician of Filaret Hospital, called Sterian "illiterate", and suggested that Medicul Poporului was "intoxicating the public" with "repugnant" information.

[31] Sterian was present for the massive Conservative and Conservative-Democratic rally of April 1910, which openly challenged political domination by the National Liberal Party (PNL), and allegedly included calls to violence against its leaders.

[3] However, just weeks after the 1911 legislative election, which gave the Conservatives (reunited with Junimea) a majority in Parliament, Sterian led the inner-party opposition to the Romanian Premier, Carp.

[45] Robert de Flers wrote in Le Figaro: Dr. Eraclie Stérian—apparently well-known in Romania for his scientific works—has set for himself no less a goal than to provide France with a new means to combat depopulation [...].

"[46]With the 1913 book Cum putem mări cantitatea de vieață și Paradoxele longevității ("How Me May Enhance Life Quantitatively, and The Paradoxes of Longevity"), Sterian produced a more radical critique of degeneration theory, proposing a new take on human evolution.

[50] In summer of that year, which was shortly before the start of World War I, La Presse Médicale published his French-language essay on the supposed medical hazards of asphalt concrete.

[1][6] Following Romania's entry into the war, Sterian joined the medical officers' corps of the Second Army, becoming a Major on April 1, 1917, and a Lieutenant Colonel exactly four years later.

[34][53] He claimed that: "Soldiers who were dead—or nearly dead, due to massive blood-loss—came back to life..."[34] During the rapid retreat of late 1916, he followed the troops into Western Moldavia.

At the Military Hospital and at Colțea, he experimented with a serum that, according to his own claims, managed to alleviate symptoms of monoarthritis, orchitis, prostatitis, and gonorrhea-sourced "rheumatism"; supervised by Colonel Ilie Constantinescu, he also used this substance in treating ophthalmia caused by infection with Neisseria gonorrhoeae.

[60] Lecturing to a proletarian public in Câmpina during January 1927, he advised them to wean their children off cow's milk, noting its association with Mycobacterium bovis (and therefore with tuberculosis in humans).

[65] At one of its meetings in October 1927, Sterian proposed that banking institutions be pressured into providing landlords with cheap credit "for any reparation work that their buildings would require.

[71] The national group was dissolved by September 1933, when Sterian was recruited by the Guard for the Defense of Private Property, presided upon by former LCC chairman Eftimie Antonescu.

[72] In late 1933, Sterian was engaged in a protracted legal battle with the physicians' corps, after refusing to fill out his application under the provision of new laws regulating that profession.

As Sterian noted in his open letter, carried by Adevărul of March 2, 1934, he had borrowed money in 1927, when the leu was a floating currency, and was forced to pay it back with no adjustment, after monetary stabilization.

[77] Over those years, Paul Sterian had surpassed his father's renown, becoming one of the leading poets of the Gândirea circle, as well as a noted economist, sociologist, and diplomat.

[4] Married to artist Margareta Sterian, Paul was later head of legation in Washington, D. C., then, during World War II, a public servant of the Ion Antonescu regime.

[79] Also in 1941, Tout pour l'enfant, renamed Leagăn și Amor ("Cradle and Love"), was presented to a review committee of the National Theater Bucharest, chaired by Liviu Rebreanu.

[80] At that late stage of his life, Sterian Sr returned to publishing under the pen name Ave Caesar, with Încercări de etimologie ("Essays in Etymology", 1939–1940).

[86] The latter's daughter was the actress and model Raluca Sterian, who, during her father and uncle's persecution, protected her career by becoming the lover of communist minister Gogu Rădulescu; in 1964, she managed to emigrate to France, where she married a publisher, Jean-Jacques Nathan.