HAS Carlos CorralCorraldoctor of medicine, in memory
I remember the moment when, emerging from childhood, I discovered an extraordinary gift in my brother Carlos, the eldest boy. It’s not just, as our mother revealed to us one day, that he spoke before being born, in his womb. What was admirable for the little brothers was Carlos, among other things, as his young basketball career with its almost two meters height, that was it saved lives.
He said it himself when returning from his service as a doctor at San Carlos Clinical Hospitalafter pulling a patient out of cardiac arrest, sometimes, as he admitted, with an impacted sternum crack. As if his huge hands were blocking a deadly shot under the basket on the court.
I believe that my brother Carlos was strengthened in his vocation by the example of our medical ancestors, whom he studied in depth with the desire to give meaning to his own dedication in pain relief mission and the anguish of others.
Thus, he studied the role of our great-grandfather Corral Lion in the fight against a cholera epidemic in the town of Alfaro, in Rioja, where he published a booklet on patient care and prevention. Or the treatise on general pathology that he wrote and on the last edition of which his son collaborated Jose Mariaour grandfather.
Carlos had proven that the first to apply for the candidacy of Ramon and Cajal because the Nobel Prize in Medicine was our great-grandfather León, in the same way as the first to have awarded the Severo Ochoa It was our grandfather José María, who accompanied him to collect the prize with the neuropathologist Fernando de Castro. The letter that Don Santiago wrote to our great-grandfather regarding his merits in obtaining the Nobel Prize is published and commented on by my brothers Carlos and Íñigo.
From Ramón y Cajal to Ochoa, there is a legacy of great importance for Spanish science, equal to that The Silver Age of Literatureto the study of which Carlos devoted himself with enthusiasm also out of devotion to his ancestors. There he discovers Juan Negrin scientist, with whom our grandfather José María collaborated fruitfully in the physiology laboratory of the Council for Expansion of Studies, established between 1925 and 1935 in the Student Residence, then in the Faculty of Medicine of the University City.
This authentic school of friendship and coexistence between different peoples, which included Severo Ochoa, José María and Francisco García Valdecasas, Blas Cabrera and Francisco Grande Covián, was destroyed by the Civil war and exile, also material: in the photos taken by the reporter Robert Capa at the Faculty of Medicine of the Ciudad Universitaria, Carlos managed to identify thanks to the instruments the new laboratory installed there by Negrín and our grandfather, occupied by the troops of the Commune battalion. from Paris, from 11th International Brigadeduring the Battle of Madrid.
The books from the laboratory library served as a parapet for the fighters. The grandfather José María organized a rescue plan for these volumes in the middle of the war, removing them from the windows of the Faculty of Medicine with the help of his teenagers. Carmen and José María. Many specimens kept ammunition embedded in their guts. Negrín himself congratulated him on this performance, which my aunt Carmen always remembered with a real thrill.
In 2008, Carlos dedicated a book to this school published by the foundation that bears the name of the Canarian doctor and politician: ANDl Doctor Juan Negrín and the Physiology Laboratory of the Commission for Expansion of Studies (1916-1936). For him it was the symbol of the Spain that could have been and was not, where a socialist like Negrín and a traditionalist like our grandfather joined forces for the improvement and scientific progress of the country .
As the quote he collected at the beginning of the book says, from the exile José Pucheeveryone in this laboratory, teachers and disciples, aspired to build “a homeland where all Spaniards integrate, complement each other, are not hurt, without bitterness… worthy of past generations and an example for those who are emerging” .
My brother was also, in his own way, a continuation of the spirit of this laboratory, placing the value of people before political ideas, with a liberal mentality worthy of praise. He has always claimed the history of this research center as a great lesson in love for Spain, friendship and tolerance, very far from the abyss of confrontation into which Spanish society ended up falling, towards which he saw with concern that they now wanted to direct us. Again. .
But beyond the nostalgic evocation of this past, Carlos’ daily work as a doctor was a constant claim of the commitment and effort that everyone must provide for the benefit of all, as shown in an exemplary manner those tragic days before the end of the war. flood disaster in our Levant. During his last days, he experienced the suffering of those affected with genuine dismay.
I do not want to forget in these lines what my brother said about his work in a Leganés Health Centerwhere he served as a consultant before joining the research department of a multinational pharmaceutical company, where he retired. One afternoon, as he left his office to call the next patient, he heard an old woman waiting at his door say to another, “This doctor is very good! He told it with such satisfaction that it seemed that with these words he had received the same prize as Ramón y Cajal and Ochoa.
I have no doubt that his first merit in achieving such a good evaluation of his patients was knowing how to listen to them. This is why he liked to remember the anecdote of Gregorio Marañón when a reporter asked him what he thought was the most important medical breakthrough. The doctor and humanist answered very briefly: the chair.
For Carlos, the chair was also the most important instrument a doctor had to have to sit at the head of the patient’s bed and listen to him. In his blog www.carlosdeiracheta.com, the ultimate expression of his scientific and humanist facets, he analyzed in detail two series of photographs that captured the attitudes of Sir William Oslerexemplary North American doctor of the 19th century, and our Gregorio Marañón, seated on their respective chairs in front of their patients.
His conclusion from these analyses, which were also based on his personal experience, was that given the effectiveness of new diagnostic and therapeutic technologies, the curative virtue that the doctor himself exerted on the patient through “the power of speechgaze, gestures, body posture.
His belief in this power and his desire to exercise it were such that, during his retirement, he decided to join a medical consulting company. And I was really happy to do it.
Now, the death that he had conquered so many times came to tell him that for him the hour had already come, like the knight in the old Castilian romance that his admired singer sang. Joaquin Diaz.
But it was not death, but the life that so fully distinguished him that was realized in him. his latest creation: to give him with his sudden farewell the reward of a luminous and generous existence, dedicated to the love of his family and dedicated to remedying the suffering and despair of others with these thousands of years of knowledge and ancestral wisdom which, as his son Carlos said in his farewell, precious.
Rest in peace.
