Archivo Rodrigo Pertegás

These archives, housed in the History of Medicine Library and Museum, include part of the extensive work conducted by José Rodrigo Pertegás (1854-1927) on different archives in the city of Valencia, from which he extracted and compiled a wide range of documentation and all types of information about medicine. As a result it provides information about the history of medicine that originated in archives that are still perfectly accessible at present, such as the Municipal or Reino (kingdom) Archives, and archives that no longer exist, such as the parish archives.

These archives are currently divided into three sections. The first and perhaps the most important consists of 14 boxes that contain the materials gathered together by Rodrigo Pertegás to write a biobibliography of Valencian physicians. The copied or extracted documents are ordered by centuries, grouped in turn in files in alphabetical order, with each file dealing with a physician or surgeon. The information, dating from the Middle Ages to the first third of the 20th century, is heterogeneous and contains information on topics data ranging from publications, to births, marriages and wills, and contracts with the municipality and the performance of professorships of medicine.

A great deal of said information has been used by both professors in the Department and researchers investigating Valencian physicians, because of the wealth and precision of the collected information. There are also a few original documents. It must also be remembered that much of the information was collected from archives that no longer exist or that are difficult to locate, as is the case of the wills.

The second section consists of three boxes containing information obtained from very similar sources as the previous section. One contains information about epidemics, mainly in the city of Valencia, and the other two consist of information, under the title of miscellaneous, about aspects of health, the profession and medical practice in Valencia from Classical Antiquity until the 20th century.

Finally, the third section consists of a box of nineteenth-century, Valencian, medical manuscripts and works by Rodrigo Pertegás himself. One manuscript contains all the information he compiled for his studies of Ros de Ursins, Jaume Roig and Pere Pintor. The second one contains information on Pedro Ros and Faustino Barberá, and the original manuscript and documents used to write his study of syphilis in fifteenth- and sixteenth-century Valencia.