Surgeons - Anatomists of the 'camp de Tarragona'. Soldiers equipped with an academic plan

ABSTRACT

At the end of the 17th Century the university training of surgery in Spain depended on the traditional faculties of medicine in the universities. In these faculties ‘teaching continued to be conceived as an oral apprenticeship based on memory, and the theoretical principles of the Renaissance’ (Granjel, 1979). Training in surgery was dependent on the badly equipped Departments of Anatomy, where anatomy and surgery were taught. The work ‘Institutions of Surgery’ of Luis Mercado, published in 1599 by order of Felipe II, continued to be recommended. Felipe II prohibited ‘foreign travel to study or learn or reside in foreign universities or the study in their colleges …’ (Ferrer, 1968). These Departments trained many university surgeon - so called ‘Latin surgeons’ because they spoke Latin - who were ill prepared (Massons, 2002), with the result that the greater part of the population were treated by barbers or romance surgeons - surgeons without university training who had learnt from another surgeon (Vallribera i Puig, 1987). There was also much 'practice' with no training at all (Bustos Rodriguez, 1983). The evolution of a surgery eminently practical at the beginning of the 18th Century to surgical practice based on a solid training programme and scientific principals cannot be explained in Spain without the participation of an interrelated group of surgeons, all of them from the same birthplace, the ‘Camp de Tarragona’ (AU)

RESUMEN

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