UVlibrariesUniversitat de València Logo del portal

  • Fotografía sala lectura biblioteca

León José Antonio Sánchez-Quintanar y Sánchez-Nieto (Mota del Cuervo, 20/2/1801 - Valencia, 16/3/1877)

 

León Sánchez-Quintanar

He studied medicine and surgery at the Royal College of San Carlos in Madrid, where his teachers included Juan Mosácula, whom he assisted in his work Fisiología humana (Human physiology), and Antonio Hernández Morejón, with whom he worked as an assistant on Historia bibliográfica de la medicina española (Bibliographical history of Spanish medicine).
After teaching anatomy, surgical pathology and clinic and dressings at the College of Practitioners of the Art of Healing in Seville for one academic year, he arrived in Santiago de Compostela as professor of medical natural history, but soon left his post to take up the post of professor of surgical pathology in Valencia, where he remained until his death.

Among his publications we can find works related to his teaching, such as Nuevas consideraciones teórico-prácticas acerca de la inflamación ilimitada o no circunscrita llamada flegmón difuso or La inflamación al alcance de los cursantes de cirugía (New theoretical and practical considerations about the unlimited or non-circumscribed inflammation called diffuse phlegmon or Inflammation within the reach of surgical trainees), which compiled subjects he taught at the faculty. He also wrote on surgery and anaesthesia, and his communication to the 1st Spanish Medical Congress in 1864, in which he described a leg amputation using an innovative technique, is particularly noteworthy.

However, the most notable of his works are the historical-medical repertoires Biblioteca Médica Hispano-Lusitana and Biblioteca Quirúrgica Hispano-Lusitana, in which he took advantage of the experience he acquired as assistant to Hernández Morejón's repertoire.
In this work Sánchez-Quintanar collected 1,215 authors (many not collected either by Morejón or by Anastasio Chinchilla, authors of the two previous classic repertories) with their bio-bibliographical data, as well as analyses of their works and, sometimes, documents related to them (wills, letters, birth certificates...).
Unfortunately, the two works remained unpublished until the University of Valencia and the Botín Foundation produced a digital edition by researchers from the López Piñero Institute for the History of Science and Documentation (now the López Piñero Inter-University Institute).

 

More biographic informtion

 

Donation

León Sánchez-Quintanar amassed an important library, which included rare printed and printed books from the 16th to the 19th centuries. His children donated it after his death to the Faculty of Medicine of Valencia, at the request of its dean Nicolás Ferrer y Julve.

The donation consisted of almost 1,000 monographs and booklets (as well as 42 manuscripts and 28 collections of journals), in Spanish, Latin and French, mainly from the 18th and 19th centuries, but also some works from the 16th century which are very difficult to find. 
Moreover, the manuscripts include both those of his own works La Biblioteca Médica Hispano-Lusitana and La Biblioteca Quirúrgica Hispano-Lusitana, (thanks to which they could be recovered for the public) and those of materials destined to the elaboration of these (notarial privileges, etc.) or of other writings of his.

Today this collection is available for consultation in the Biblioteca Historicomédica, and constitutes an excellent source of information for researchers of the History of Medicine in Spain.
Although the legacy does not have a differentiated location or signature, we can find out which works originally composed it thanks to the publication in 1896 of the Catálogo de las obras que pertenecieron a la biblioteca del Dr. D. León Sánchez-Quintanar [...] by Benito José Nebot Pérez, librarian of the Faculty of Medicine, and also which of them survived the passage of time and transfers thanks to the work of Dr. Juan Antonio Micó Navarro Catálogo del fondo Sánchez-Quintanar, published in 1994 and available online in the digital repository of the CSIC.

 

Works at the University of Valencia Library catalogue

Follow the links to see what works we have in the University of Valencia Libraries:

 

Bibliographic selection as author

Monographs

Journal articles