«Clinical Examination Treatise» by Nóvoa Santos and Vila Barberá

Abstract

During the Spanish culture Silver Age (1898-1936), medicine was not indifferent to this new Reinaissance. And it was owing to the birth of some important Spanish figures, born since 1870; to the arrival of the modern scientific medicine from France with Magendie, Bernard, Pasteur’s works, and from Germany with Virchow, Koch, von Krehl and others’works; and to the fact that our doctors went there to study, thanks to the activity of the JAE., founded in 1907, during Alfonso XIII’s reign, and whose president was D. Santiago Ramón y Cajal. For the first time since the Golden Age, Spanish medicine was among the best in the world. Next to translations of foreign works, a valuable own output comes up. Cajal and Tello’s neurohistological work, with Achúcarro, Simarro, etc. and the appearance of medicine treatises like that one written by Hernando and Marañón, Nóvoa Santos’ General Pathology and the monumental Ibero-American treatise on Internal Medicine by Fidel Fernández, are a good example of this. However, scientific medicine for general practitioners was asking for a complete but feasible clinical examination work. Noguer Molins had written one in 1916, but it did not include radiology or laboratory. We are presenting the first attempt, unknown up to now, of publishing a complete feasible manual on clinical examination, radiology and laboratory, written by two of the most important medicine figures in that time: General Pathology chairs in Madrid and Valencia, Roberto Nóvoa Santos and Ramón Vila Barberá.