The lectures and debates will take place at the López Piñeiro Inter-University Institute (4, Cisneros Square, Valencia). The symposium will begin on Thursday, 30 May at 3:45pm with a panel discussion chaired by Àlvar Martínez-Vidal. UV’s Full Professor Josep Lluís Barona will give a lecture on ‘Valencian doctors in the exile: a historiographical balance’ (orig. ‘El exilio de los médicos valencianos: un balance historiográfico’), Josep Bernabeu and Mercedes Pascual from the University of Alacant on ‘Repressed doctors: the cases of José Estellés Salarich and Àngel Pascual Devesa’ (orig. ‘Los médicos represaliados: el casos de José Estellés Salarich y Àngel Pascual Devesa’), and Historian Àngel Beneito on ‘On the way to exile: itineraries of the dispersion of Valencian doctors’ (orig.‘Camino al exilio: itinerarios de la dispersión de los médicos valencianos’).

Check the full programme here.

There are many studies on the exile of Republican doctors after the Spanish Civil War (1936-1939), such as Medicine in the Republican exile (orig. La medicina en el exilio republicano), by Francisco Guerra. The book was published in Madrid in 2003 and includes over 3,000 biographical entries on doctors, odontologists, pharmacists, nurses, assistants, etc., who had to go into exile. Even though it is a reference work, it has some limitations.

The Valencian case has an additional peculiarity due to the practical impossibility of escaping the Francoist repression after the war ended on 1 April 1939. A small number of doctors fled to France or to the Maghreb, but many suffered reprisals in Spain and were sanctioned, like Luis Urtubey and Ricard Muñoz Carbonero, exiled, like José Chabàs and José Estellés Salarich, or executed, like Joan B. Peset Aleixandre and the Uribes Moreno brothers. The extinction of the administrative and professional bodies caused the destruction of many previous health projects.

Nowadays, only a few exiled Valencian doctors are remembered, such as Francesc Bosch i Morata, Councillor of Culture and first President of the Institute of Valencian Studies, or José Puche, Full Professor of Physiology and Principal of the Universitat de València, who carried out a fruitful work –teaching and research– on the integration of the exiled. Names like Domerio Mas, Mercedes Maestre Martí, Rafael Vilar Fiol or Manuel Usano Martín are virtually ignored, not only by those interested in the Civil War, but also by medicine and science historians.

The symposium aims to analyse the individual and collective trajectories of some of them. It also seeks to continue and extend in the medical field the research and teaching work originated from the exhibition Valencian doctors in the exile (orig. Escritores valencianos del exilio), from the Acadèmia Valenciana de la Llengua, which was open to public between November 2023 and February 2024 in La Nau, the headquarters of the Office of the Vice-Principal for Culture and Society.