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It was possibly the most amazing anatomy class ever. On November 11, 1908, Professor Alejandro San Martín—a famous surgeon who had just been Minister of Public Instruction—went to give his last lecture at the Faculty of Medicine in Madrid. The unusual thing about that Wednesday morning is that San Martín, 61, had been dead the day before. In his will he had ordered that his corpse, wrapped in his academic robe, be carried in a two-horse hearse to the dissection room, so that his students could continue learning from his teacher. . In a solemn ceremony, with imposing silence, three other professors opened the skull of his classmate and extracted his brain before hundreds of students. The Ministry of Science is now studying using the place that hosted that extraordinary lesson – the so-called old mansion of San Carlos, on Atocha Street – as the headquarters of the future National Brain Museum, promised by President Pedro Sánchez for June 2025.
The monumental building of the old Faculty of Medicine of Madrid, opened in 1834 and abandoned in 1965, occupies an entire block and witnessed the birth of modern medicine. In the early years, surgeons entered operating rooms with dirty hands and stiff gowns from the buildup of pus and dried blood from previous patients. In 1865, the English doctor Joseph Lister invented the first antiseptic method—carbolic acid to disinfect wounds—and changed the history of humanity. Alejandro San Martín met Lister in person and spread his revolutionary techniques from the Madrid mansion.
The expectation is maximum. The spokesperson for the Ministry of Science emphasizes that what was promised is a National Museum and that it will guard Cajal’s legacy, a scientific treasure with thousands of drawings, impressive photographs taken by the Nobel Prize winner and slices of brains that illuminated the functioning of human thought. The old mansion of Atocha is one of the three great works that remain in Madrid from the reign of Fernando VII, along with the Royal Theater and the Senate, according to the architectural historian Pedro Moleón. The building is property of the State, but it has two de facto owners: one part is from the Ministry of Science itself and has been transferred to the College of Physicians since 1970; the rest, occupied by the National Institute of Public Administration, belongs to the Ministry of Finance.
The first female doctors of Medicine
The Ninth Symphony by Beethoven premiered in Madrid on April 2, 1882. Just six months later another momentous event occurred in the city. Dolores Aleu, 25 years old, became the first doctorate in Medicine in Spain, after reading her thesis in the Atocha mansion. “The life of a woman, since the most remote times, has been a continuous martyrdom,” Aleu began, before a probably stupefied audience. “The strange, sad and ridiculous thing is that this martyrdom continues, in the middle of the century of enlightenment,” she lamented.
What followed was a corrosive feminist speech, absolutely historic, in which Aleu denounced prostitution, the slavery of poor working women and the cynicism of men, who previously kept silent about these injustices but watched with horror as young women became educated. “What danger is there in women knowing the ailments of their own sex and being recognized as capable of practicing medicine, if they show proof of possessing sufficient knowledge in this branch of knowledge? What damage must this cause? My weak intelligence, no matter how much it tortures itself, cannot find any,” Aleu snapped at the court with irony. Days later another woman, Martina Castells, received her doctorate. “The newspapers that witnessed the event say that it was necessary to suppress a traditional ceremony: the hugs of the faculty to the graduating student. As this omission was not known in advance, the entire faculty had attended the ceremony,” the magazine published. The Spanish and American Enlightenment.
María José Rebollo, head of Artistic Heritage at the College of Physicians, speaks with enthusiasm, almost with love, about the old mansion. “This building represents the history of science and medicine better than any other,” he maintains in the great amphitheater that hosted the dissection of Alejandro San Martín and masterful talks by great scientists, such as the French physicist Marie Curie and the Russian physiologist Iván Pavlov, the one with Pavlov’s dog.
Rebollo points up, to the nineteenth-century frescoes with the faces of the legends of Spanish medicine. “This is like a stray. Many streets bear the names of these doctors: Castelló, Drumen, Fourquet… The lord of that medallion is Diego de Argumosa, who was the first to go from operating on patients sitting to placing them lying down. And he was also one of the first to wash his hands before the operation,” he details. The College of Physicians will open an exhibition about its own history on February 22.
The doctor Severo Ochoa also studied here, so the only two Spaniards who have won the Nobel Prize in Medicine came from this mansion. Even the word operating room was born here, in the old Faculty of Medicine, which once included what is now the Conservatory of Music and was directly connected to the Provincial Hospital of Madrid, currently converted into the Reina Sofía Museum. In the room where the Guernica Very seriously ill patients with the plagues of that time, such as typhus and tuberculosis, were piling up at Picasso. The corpses arrived via a walkway to the Atocha mansion, to be dissected by the students. The writer and doctor Pío Baroja was one of these students, around 1888. In his memoirs, he recalled hearing that another colleague took the arm of a dead man and placed it under his cloak, to present the cold hand to his friends. They came up to greet him.
For the living there was the operating room. The doctor Andrés del Busto explained the origin of the word in 1892, after inaugurating the first aseptic operating room, separated from the students and their germs by a glass wall. “We gave it the name operating room, because we understood that this new name, formed from two roots, which mean surgery and transparent, represented well the idea of being able to perform operations in it, so that they could be seen by the disciples without being there. in the same operating room,” wrote Del Busto, chamber physician to Queen Elizabeth II.
Five medical institutions – including the College itself – signed on July 2, 2021 an agreement to create in the Atocha mansion, in an undetermined future, the Spanish Museum of Medicine, a collection that would bring together jewels scattered in other entities. One of its main promoters is Antonio Campos, a professor at the University of Granada who sits in Cajal’s chair at the Royal National Academy of Medicine. The academic believes that the two projects can coexist. “They are not incompatible proposals. And it 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 a political push,” he believes. Campos remembers that the Spanish Government worked hard to transform the Provincial Hospital into a contemporary art museum in 1986. “If the Reina Sofía was created, why not create this one?” Campos asks.
María Urioste Ramón y Cajal, great-granddaughter of the Nobel Prize winner, says that she is moved every time she enters the mansion. “I would love for it to be the headquarters of the museum, because it is where my great-grandfather taught and it is in the heart of Madrid’s museums. It’s the perfect place. Years ago I heard that they wanted to take the museum to Alcalá de Henares and I already said that it had nothing to do there,” she says. The idea of creating a large museum dedicated to Cajal has been around practically since the scientist’s death in 1934. Many projects have failed, even in the Atocha mansion. A small part of his legacy is now exhibited 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. “Having reconstructed the architecture of the head and made the new adaptation of the skin to the frontal bone, with such scrupulous precision that the facial expression was perfect, they proceeded to open the thoracic cavity by cutting the ribs and raising the sternum,” he would recall six more decades. late in your book History of Madrid medicine. After studying their partner’s heart and lungs, and too excited to continue, the three professors decided to end the class without opening San Martín’s abdominal viscera.
In his will, the former minister had begged his colleagues to dissect him in front of their students. “I hope that the love of humanity, science and teaching, well proven in my dear bosses and colleagues at this university, will make them lend me this last favor, sure as I am that having achieved it I will leave an example worthy of imitation.” , he implored. Minister Diana Morant will have to decide shortly if she imitates her predecessor, who even handed over her body, to turn the old Atocha mansion into a sanctuary of medicine.
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