Commemorating the 250th anniversary of the Royal College of Surgery of Barcelona (1760-1843): the beginnings of modern surgery

• Autores: Núria Pérez Pérez
• Localización: The Circulation of Science and Technology: Proceedings of the 4th International Conference of the European Society for the History of Science. Barcelona, 18-20 November 2010 / coord. por Antoni M. Roca Rosell, 2012, ISBN 978-84-9965-108-8, págs. 980-985
• Idioma: inglés
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• Resumen

  • Taking the Royal College of Barcelona (1760-1843) as a case study, this communication shows the development of modern surgery in Spain initiated by Bourbon Monarchy founding a new kind of institutions by means of its academic activities of diffusion of science.

    Founded 250 years ago, in 1760, the Royal College of Surgery of Barcelona was the second college of surgery created in Spain. The new college was erected near the old Hospital of Santa Creu. Learning human bodily structure by performing hands-on dissections in the anatomical theatre has become a fundamental element of modern medical education.

    Antoni Gimbernat worked with tenacity from Madrid improving the quality of the royal colleges in Spain, but before that, he was professor of Anatomy in the College of Barcelona and the most famous Spanish surgeon with international recognition.

    Gimbernat favoured the study of natural sciences, the new chemistry of Lavoisier and the experimental physics in the academic programs of surgery. As a result of that, the academic program developed in the new colleges of surgery was different from the traditional formal education for surgeons. The new physician-surgeons trained there were not only interested in therapeutics, but also wanted to know as much as possible about the bodies’ anatomy and physiology, being as they were in competition with its pathology.

    According to the study of a very relevant set of documents preserved in the library, the so-called “Juntas Literarias”, we have notice about the main subjects debated in these clinical sessions about the concept of human being and diseases in relation to the development of the new experimental sciences. These documents evidenced that chemistry and experimental physics were considered crucial tools to understand the unexplained processes that happened in the human body in a medico-surgical context.