The biography of Juan Bautista González-Aguilar Peñaranda (Moratalla, Murcia, 1892 – Córdoba, Argentina, 1952) is paradigmatic of the trajectory of professionals and intellectuals who, in order to maintain their fidelity to the Republic, were forced into exile and carried out their work outside of Spain, thus truncating the takeoff that the country was experiencing in what is known as “Silver age” of science and culture. While Juan González-Aguilar leaned towards surgery, other members of his family also stood out in other areas of culture: his brothers Francisco, Elisa, José and Ezequiel formed a string quartet in 1923 that became well known as “ Aguilar Quartet”, very close to figures such as Falla, Granados, Halffter, Alberti, etc. All of them were sons of Juan González Aguilar, doctor of the Royal Household from La Ñora (Murcia), and his wife Filomena Peñaranda, also from Murcia.
Juan González-Aguilar studied medicine at the Faculty of Madrid, where he graduated in 1918 and was an assistant to Manuel Bastos Ansart, a reference in Spanish traumatology. From the first moment he began an intense formative activity that led him, between 1921 and 1923, to carry out study and work stays in America and Europe with international figures of recognized prestige in his field. He worked in Argentina in the Pedro Chutró clinic, as well as in those of José Arce and Avelino Gutiérrez (the latter of Spanish origin and collaborator and patron of the Board for the Extension of Studies -JAE-) at the Spanish Hospital of Buenos Aires . Later, in Montevideo (Uruguay), he collaborated with Dr. Alfredo Navarro. In Europe he was in France, England, Portugal, Greece and Italy; in the latter country he visited the Rizzoli Orthopedic Institute, one of the best hospitals in his specialty in the world, in 1923. González-Aguilar obtained his doctorate in 1927 with a thesis on peripheral nerve sutures.
His biography is paradigmatic of the trajectory of professionals and intellectuals who, in order to maintain their fidelity to the Republic, were forced into exile.
In 1921 he entered the Navy with the rank of medical lieutenant and was assigned to the Hospital de Marina de Cartagena. He participated in war actions in North Africa aboard the cruiser “Catalonia”. In 1926 he was attached by the Ministry of the Navy to the Orthopedic Surgery Clinic that he directed. Manuel Bastos at the Carabanchel military hospital. When he was later assigned to Ferrol, he requested to become a supernumerary without pay so as not to abandon his work in Madrid. In 1928 the JAE granted him a pension to study in Italy, which he took advantage of to return to the Rizzoli Orthopedic Institute, directed by Professor Vittorio Putti.
Medical Murcia 1918; 4(44).
Archive of History of Medicine.
University of Murcia.
In 1929, with a very innovative spirit, the Marqués de Valdecilla Health House, in Santander, conceived to meet the needs of the time, with assistance, teaching, research and preventive functions. The first specialist training structure, a nursing school, research laboratories, etc., were created in this center. He became one of the most important promoters of medical science in Spain, and Pío del Río Ortega also belonged to him, as honorary director of the Anatomy, Pathology and Cancerology Laboratory. González-Aguilar was appointed to head the Bones and Joints service, which he held from 1929 to 1937, when Santander fell into the hands of the rebels.
During this period, again with a scholarship from the JAE and in the company of traumatologist Manuel Clavel (later President of the College of Physicians of Murcia), he was also able to further his training in bone graft surgery at Dr. Albee’s clinic at Memorial Hospital. of Cancer in New York, and at the Mayo Clinic. He obtained by competitive examination the position of director of the Sanatorio Marítimo de Pedrosa, in Santander, an old lazaretto that since 1914 was dedicated to bone and tubercular diseases. González-Aguilar combined this dedication with the service leadership of Valdecilla. He also had an outstanding participation in the Santander Summer University where he taught courses on “Fractures” and “Osteoarticular Tuberculosis”.
In July 1935 he participated in the constitution of the Spanish Society of Orthopedic Surgery and Traumatology (SECOT), of which he was Vice President a year later, and in 1935 he attended the X International Congress of Surgery in Cairo, with a communication on sympathetic surgery; and the Congress of the International Association of Thalassotherapy held in San Sebastián, with a paper entitled “Indications and contraindications of sunbathing in osteoarticular tuberculosis”, published in the first issue of the magazine Orthopedic Surgery and Traumatology. He actively collaborated in the only two issues of this magazine (interrupted by the Civil War in 1936, the same as its creation), organ of the SECOT. He also participated in the SECOT congress in Barcelona in 1936, in which he presented the “Operative treatment of recent long bone fractures”, co-signed with Antonio Hernández-Ros Codorniu.
He reached the rank of medical colonel of the Navy in 1935 and during the Civil War he did not cease his scientific activity.
reached the degree Navy medical colonel in 1935 and during the Civil War he did not cease his scientific activity. In 1937 he joined the Sanitary Service of the Carabineros Corps. With the fall of Santander in the hands of the insurgents, he moved to Barcelona, where in May 1938 he was listed as head of the services of the Military Clinic No. 1 (Orphanage Ribas) of the Barcelona Surgical Group, directed by Joaquim Trias i Pujol. The same year he participated in the Catalan delegation to the XI Congress of the International Society of Surgery that took place in Brussels. At some point he worked as a professor of Pathology and Surgical Clinic at the University of Valencia.
At the end of the Civil War, having been linked to the PSOE and held various public positions for the Republican administration, he crossed the French border and was admitted to a concentration camp. Shortly after went into exile in Argentina, where previously, taking advantage of his brothers’ stay in the country, he had sent his wife (Francisca Precioso Ruano, 33, also from Murcia) and their four children (who became five). After a stay in Buenos Aires, the family settled at the end of 1938 in Alta Gracia, a town where some Spanish exiles such as Manuel de Falla had been arriving and where Rafael Alberti, María Teresa León, Pau Casals and others also went. In Alta Gracia they are received by the family formed by Ernesto Guevara Lynch and Celia de la Serna with their four children, among them the little Ernesto10 years old, who would become the Che Guevara.
Having been linked to the PSOE and held various public positions, he crossed the French border and was admitted to a concentration camp.
Juan González-Aguilar joined them after the Civil War was over. The union with the Guevara family deepened, and through this friendship a notable influence on the ideology of Ernesto Che guevara. José, son of Juan González-Aguilar, in turn joined the guerrilla in Cuba. Che Guevara, with whom the friendship was very close.
In 1941 Juan González-Aguilar was appointed head of the Osteoarticular Tuberculosis Service at the Institute of Physiology of the National University of Córdoba directed by Gumersindo Sayago. Earlier, in 1940, he published in Buenos Aires the manual Pathology and general clinic of tuberculosis of the skeleton whose prologue was signed by Sayago.
Through his exile, and that of his family, Juan González-Aguilar became Ambassador of Spanish Medicine that began to take off in the first third of the 20th century, as well as a bearer of republican and solidarity values. He wasn’t the only one. With him they were forced into exile, to mention only the Murcian countrymen of González-Aguilar so as not to make the list endless, the physiologist José Puche Álvarez, the ophthalmologist Antonio Ros Sáez and the pharmacologist Rafael Méndez Martínez, all three in Mexico; and also the psychiatrist and historian of Medicine Félix Martí Ibáñez, in the United States.
BIBLIOGRAPHY:
Corral Garcia, Mario. Materials for a bibliography of Dr. Juan González-Aguilar. Santander: Marquesa de Pelayo Library; 2014.
Aguilar, Mateo; Zarza, Martin Alonso. The González-Aguilar family, the wake of the republican exile in Argentina. ctxt context and action 11/28/2018;(197) Available at Accessed 12/27/2022
Diaz-R. Labajo, Mª Aranzazu. The republican scientific exile in Argentina. Contributions and impact of Spanish doctors, biomedical doctors and psychoanalysts in Argentine science (1936-2003). Salamanca: University of Salamanca; 2016, p. 114-5
Jose Miguel Saez Gomez Y Pedro Marset Fields | Professors of History of Medicine. University of Murcia.
