The mansion where a former minister was publicly dissected wants to become a national museum. Science

This was probably the most amazing anatomy class I have ever been to. On November 11, 1908, Professor Alejandro San Martín – a renowned surgeon who had recently become Minister of Public Instruction – went to Madrid to give his last lecture at the Faculty of Medicine. What was unusual about that Wednesday morning was that San Martín, 61, had died the day before. In his will he ordered that his body be wrapped in his academic toga and carried in a two-horse hearse…

This was probably the most amazing anatomy class I have ever been to. On November 11, 1908, Professor Alejandro San Martín – a renowned surgeon who had recently become Minister of Public Instruction – went to Madrid to give his last lecture at the Faculty of Medicine. What was unusual about that Wednesday morning was that San Martín, 61, had died the day before. In his will he ordered that his body, wrapped in his academic robes, be taken to the dissection room in a two-horse hearse, so that his students could continue learning from their teacher. In a solemn ceremony, accompanied by solemn silence, three other professors, in front of hundreds of students, opened their colleague’s skull and extracted his brain. The Ministry of Science is now studying using the space that hosted that extraordinary text – the so-called Old Mansion of San Carlos on Atocha Street – as the headquarters of the future National Brain Museum, which President Pedro Sánchez has planned for June 2025. Had promised.

Historian María José Rebollo showed EL País the building and stopped in the exact spot where San Martín’s autopsy took place, now in the magnificent amphitheater of the College of Physicians of Madrid. It is easy to imagine the scene that morning in 1908. The professor’s body lay on an alabaster table, with blood dripping into a metal bucket. Professors and pupils cried when they saw their teacher, who played Mozart on the piano and drove around with one of the first automobiles open to the public in Madrid. Next to the body was researcher Santiago Ramón y Cajal, who two years earlier had won the Nobel Prize in Medicine for demonstrating that the brain is organized into distinct cells: neurons. Kajal, who was also a teacher at Purani Haveli, was attending the public dissection of one of her best friends.

The monumental building of the Old Faculty of Medicine of Madrid, opened in 1834 and abandoned in 1965, occupies an entire block and witnesses the birth of modern medicine. In the early years, surgeons entered the operating room with dirty hands and stiff gowns due to the accumulation of pus and dried blood from previous patients. In 1865, the English doctor Joseph Lister invented the first antiseptic method for disinfecting wounds – carbolic acid – and changed the history of humanity. Alejandro San Martín met Lister personally and disseminated his revolutionary techniques from his Madrid mansion.

President of the Government Pedro Sánchez announced “the creation of a museum dedicated to the functioning of the brain” on October 3, 2022. Science Minister Diana Morant said that this museum space will be named after Kajal. A little more than a year after the promise of its inauguration, it is not even known where it will be, but a ministry spokesperson confirmed to EL PAíS that one of the final options is the old mansion on Atocha Street. It seems to be an ideal candidate: the classroom where Cajal taught until his retirement in 1922 is intact, the building belongs to the state and is also part of the Landscape of Light (declared a World Heritage Site by UNESCO), very close to the great Madrid’s museums: Prado, Thyssen and Reina Sofia.

Expectation is maximum. The Science Ministry spokesperson emphasizes that what was promised is a national museum and that it will protect Cajal’s legacy, a scientific treasury with thousands of paintings, impressive photographs taken by the Nobel laureate and fragments of the brain. Which throws light on human functioning. thought. According to the architectural historian Pedro Moleón, the Old Mansion of Atocha is one of the three great masterpieces that remain in Madrid from the reign of Fernando VII, along with the Royal Theater and the Senate. The building is state property, but has two real owners: one part belongs to the Ministry of Science itself and since 1970 has been transferred to the College of Physicians; The remainder, in the possession of the National Institute of Public Administration, belongs to the Ministry of Finance.

First female doctor of medicine

ninth symphony Premiere in Madrid on April 2, 1882 by Beethoven. Exactly six months later, another important event occurred in the city. Dolores Aleu, 25, became the first doctorate in medicine in Spain, after reading her thesis in the Atocha mansion. “A woman’s life, from the most remote times, has been a continuous martyrdom,” Aleu began in front of a presumably stunned audience. He lamented, “The strange, sad, and ridiculous thing is that this martyrdom continues even in the middle of the century of the Enlightenment.”

What followed was a corrosive feminist speech, absolutely historic, in which Aleu condemned prostitution, the slavery of poor working women, and the skepticism of men who had previously remained silent about these injustices but looked on in horror. Because young women became educated. “If women show evidence of possessing sufficient knowledge in this branch of knowledge, what danger is there in being recognized as knowing the diseases of their own sex, and being competent to practice medicine? What damage should this do? My feeble mind, no matter how much it tortures itself, cannot find anyone,” Aleu said sarcastically in court. A few days later another woman, Martina Castells, received her doctorate. “Newspaper reporters who witnessed the event say it was necessary to suppress the traditional ceremony: the faculty embrace of the graduating student. “Since this omission was not known in advance, the entire faculty attended the ceremony,” the magazine published. Spanish and American Enlightenment,

María José Rebollo, head of Artistic Heritage at the College of Physicians, talks about the old mansion with enthusiasm, almost fondly. “This building represents the history of science and medicine better than any other,” he maintains of the great amphitheater that has hosted the dissections of Alejandro San Martín and the lives of such greats as the French physicist Marie Curie and the Russian physiologist Ivan Pavlov. Hosted excellent talks by scientists. , the one with Pavlov’s dog.

Rebollo points to nineteenth-century frescoes bearing the faces of giants of Spanish medicine. “It’s like a vagabond. Many streets bear the names of these doctors: Castello, Drammen, Fourquet… The owner of that medal is Diego de Argumosa, who was the first to perform operations on patients from operating to laying them down. And he was one of the first to wash his hands before the operation,” he explained. The College of Physicians will open an exhibition about its history on 22 February.

Doctor Severo Ochoa also studied here, so the only two Spaniards to win the Nobel Prize in Medicine came from this mansion. Even the term operating room was born here, in the old Faculty of Medicine, which once included the Conservatory of Music and was directly connected to the Provincial Hospital of Madrid, currently converted into the Reina Sofia Museum. Is. the room in which Guernica Very seriously ill patients from the plagues of the time, such as typhus and tuberculosis, were flocking to Picasso. The corpses arrived via the Atocha Mansion for dissection by students. The writer and doctor Pio Baroza was one of these students around 1888. In his memoirs, he recalled hearing that another co-worker took a dead man’s hand and placed it under his cloak, to show the cool hand to waiting friends. They came to welcome him.

The living room was the operating room. The origin of the term dates back to the time Doctor Andrés del Busto inaugurated the first aseptic operating room in 1892, which was separated from the students and their germs by a glass wall. “We named it the Operating Room, because we thought that this new name, composed of two roots, meaning surgery and transparent, represented well the idea of ​​being able to perform operations in it, so that they could be seen . Del Busto, chamber physician to Queen Elizabeth II, wrote that the disciples were not present. In the same operating room.

Five medical institutions – including the college itself – signed on July 2, 2021 an agreement In the Atocha mansion, in an uncertain future, to create the Spanish Museum of Medicine, a collection that would bring together jewels scattered in other institutions. One of its main promoters is Professor Antonio Campos of the University of Granada, who holds the Cajal chair at the Royal National Academy of Medicine. The academic believes that both projects can co-exist. “They are not inconsistent proposals. And this is an almost natural idea: the building is a symbolic site of Spanish medicine and is in the axis of Madrid’s museums. We need political impetus,” he says. Campos remembers that the Spanish government worked hard to convert the provincial hospital into a contemporary art museum in 1986. “If Reina Sofia was built, why wasn’t this one built?” Campos asks.

María Urioste Ramón y Cajal, the great-granddaughter of the Nobel laureate, says she gets emotional every time she enters the mansion. “I would love to make it the headquarters of the museum, because it is where my great-grandfather taught and it is in the center of Madrid’s museums. This is the perfect place. Years ago I heard that they wanted to move the museum to Alcalá de Henares and I already said it had nothing to do there,” he says. The idea of ​​building a large museum dedicated to Cajal has been going on practically since the scientist’s death in 1934. Many projects have failed, even the Atocha mansion. A small part of his legacy is now on display in the National Museum of Natural Sciences in Madrid.

On the day of Alejandro San Martín’s dissection, a 21-year-old student, José Álvarez-Sierra, was in the first row of the stands. “After reconstructing the structure of the head and making new adaptations of the skin to the frontal bone, with such meticulous precision that the facial expression was perfect, they proceeded to open the thoracic cavity by cutting the ribs and raising the sternum ,” They said. Six more decades will be missed. your book is late Madrid history of medicine, After studying their partner’s heart and lungs, and being too excited to continue, the three professors decide to end the class without opening San Martín’s abdominal cavity.

In his will, the former minister had urged his colleagues to dissect him in front of his students. “I hope that the love of humanity, science and teaching, which is so well proven in my dear bosses and colleagues at this University, will inspire them to do me this last favor, which I am sure I will achieve. Later I will leave an example worthy of imitation.” , he pleaded. Minister Diana Morant will soon have to decide whether she should imitate her predecessor, who even gave up her body to transform the old Atocha mansion into a healing sanctuary.

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