Antonio Barcelo slowly enters his studies, but firmly. Baston in the hand, look around the attention that, with respect, mixes curiosity, as if every corner spoke a tongue that should be listened to. There is a carbon stained box, a sofa and two wooden shirts of IROCO with books that create a space. The 84 -year -old neurologist has more than twenty pensioners, but his head remains to a certain extent a high relay race with full daily activity. He was the head of the neurological service in the already extinct hospital of the son of Dyureta de Palma for more than three decades, and his name is associated with the method of treatment of medicine, which passes science and art, like the father of medicine, Hippocrates de Cos.
Today, which has already retired and as a member of the honor of the Spanish Society of Neurology, reads Daily La Prensa in libraries, observes political and sociocultural reality, present and future the youngest, writes and belongs to several clubs for reading poetry and novels, music and cinema, always with an obligation and hope to continue to work in the creation of the best world.
“If I were twenty years old today, I would resume the fields that I had to refuse like music and carefully study the consequences of artificial intelligence in medicine,” the doctor says, commenting that “in this last discipline the current and future of neurology can be found.” Despite this, he admits that human suffering cannot be reduced to algorithms, and explains that everything that is the world of AI intends to delve into the evolution of scientific thinking, since “the nervous system is the basis of this scientific and technological discipline.”
If today I was twenty years old, I would resume the fields that I had to leave as music and carefully study the consequences of artificial intelligence in medicine
Antonio Barcelo
– Neurologist
Between melodies and synapses
The conversation proceeds between books, pauses and memories of a past life that, as he said, seems to come, possibly from the inability with which he has vital avatars or an uncontrolled impulse that makes him share the history of life. His gaze is one who cannot separate science from emotions or clinical experience of personal biography. Everything in it leads to the trajectory when the mind and sensitivity shake their hands.
His last interest – although he was in this decade – rotates around music and everything that culture in the modern world. “There are no proven objective bases that explain how music can affect the cure for the personal pathology of each person who gets sick,” says Barcelo. However, “there is some base,” he adds. “We all felt that the melody could change our emotional state or alleviate the pain that seemed physically,” he says, trying to look for a sensory reaction in one of his two hemispheres of the brain.
There is no proven objective basis that explains how music can affect the cure for the personal pathology of each person who pains
Antonio Barcelo
– Neurologist
However, this approach is not born of sentimentality. Antonio Barcelo is strict. Or try to be. He quotes Oliver Sax, a British neurologist who wrote MusicOn the pages of whose pages amazing cases are told, such as in patients with Alzheimer’s disease, who forget everything except the music of their youth; Patients who restore motor coordination when hearing the rhythm; People with aphasia who manage to sing, although they cannot speak. He insists that this is not a miracle: “There is something …”. Possibly in the limbic system or in cerebral plasticity, Chi LO SA“But we must continue to investigate in order to find out how this deep connection is happening,” he concludes.
Barcelo spent a lot of time studying the life of composers, who were also sick. He talks about Beethoven and his deafness; Schubert and syphilis, which were absorbed, but above all Schumann, whose matter seems paradigmatic, and had episodes of persecution mania, extreme depression, delusions and auditory hallucinations. He was admitted to psychiatry, where he died since 46 years. And yet, in the midst of this mental storm, he composed “amazing works”, such as his Concert for pianoSomething, which makes us think about how someone can be so disorganized inside and, in turn, create something so consistent and so harmonious.
Life marked with fragility and thought
Such issues not only proceed from theory. For the doctor, it all started much earlier, in his own childhood, noted by this disease. He was born in 1941 in the full post -war period in Madrid. From Mallorcan, his parents, his father, an official by mail, was the lifting for not adhering to a new regime. The family moved to Trukhillo, Kassez. There, at the age of three to six years, Paludism and tuberculosis were reduced, the latter was subsequently cured by hydrauli and streptomycin.
Barcelo was born in 1941 in Madrid. The parents of the Mallorca, his father, an official of Correos, was responsible for not holding the new Franco regime
“I was a fragile child. I spent more time in bed than on the street, ”he says. Barcelo already knew how to read and write at the age of five. And, in the midst of this fragility, the thought discovered fertile earth. He learned to read and play the piano before going to school. His godfather, Soledad, an orphan with the war, who welcomed the doctor of the doctor in Madrid, taught him to read, name the countries of the world, repeat the poetry of memory and distinguish between musical notes. “Soledad was like a teacher,” the neurologist emphasizes who taught him to think, someone, who, perhaps acted as his mother, his first mentor in his personal and academic development.
At the age of three to six years, Barcelo became infected with malaria and tuberculosis. He learned to read and write in five years. I knew how to play the piano before even going to school
Antonio Barcelo studied the undergraduate at the college of the parents of Escolapios in San Anton in Madrid with outstanding training. During this time, he had teachers who expanded the prospect of a future life, so he conceived the study of a medical career, with magical thinking that this decision will imply the process of independent employment of future diseases and at the same time will be a doctor of its nearest environment.
The career began at the Faculty of Medicine of the Medical Department of the University of Madrid University of Completens, for the SO plan, applied by the 1953 SO, which forced the approved selective science, which could already begin the longest university career while medicine. After the research, he had to spend six months of university police ensigns and, when completed, he was adopted by the only plan for training residents at the Himenses Foundation (Clinic de -La -Konsepin) in Madrid, where he called internal medicine and neurology. In 1969, he became part of the neurological service of the Chairman of Jimenez Diaz in the Madrid clinical hospital as an attached neurologist of this service and had as the main doctor Alberto Porter, who recently returned from the United States and one of those who brought great achievements of American neurology to Spain.
Paris: Word as a diagnosis and shelter
Through the Franceis Institute in Madrid Barcelo, he received a scholarship in 1970 to go to Paris in Ptik-de Houtes, and the Py-Salpatriyer Hotel, where he carefully knew the power of the word as a diagnostic instrument. “There is no illness without history,” he said years later. He had just married Francis Avil, a nurse, with whom he met immediately before leaving, moved to the French capital and from the Latin quarter participated and lived with anti -franco -extension, at the same time absorbing the ideas of characters and culture today in France, reflected in Sartre, Lacan, Altussa, Cortazare, Cortazare and many others.
He participated and lived with anti -franco -execution in Paris, at the same time that absorbed the ideas of the characters and the culture of today in France, embodied in Sartre, Lacan, Altussere, Semprin, Cortazare and many others
Upon his return in 1972, he received the head of the neurological service of the Sea of Segovia. And in 1977, he settled in Palma and grew up from funds, the service of neurology of hospitals – Dureta. For about thirty years, he combined clinical attention with the study of the connection between art, emotions and the brain. Among his communications and articles published in special magazines, Barceló now emphasizes the teamwork in the Sandal syndrome, where this dizziness is repeated, which causes beauty, since aesthetics also affects the body. In 2005, in 2005, he received recognition of his career of a neurologist, which led to the appointment of his honor of the Spanish neurological society.
Medicine as a deep listening of suffering
A fan of Professor Pedro Line Entralgo, Barcelo, accepted his teachings about the training of medicine “through the manifestations of a sick creature.” Because for him a neurologist should know both to listen and observe, read and diagnose, based on anthropological anthropological relations. “You cannot heal without listening. And you cannot hear if you have not learned to look at the suffering of another, as if it were their own, ”he says.
You cannot heal without listening. And you cannot hear if one has not learned to look at the suffering of the other, as if it were their own
Antonio Barcelo
– Neurologist
Today he lives more in silence than in speech, although his voice is more present than when, in literary meetings, social networks or in communications (his poetic gallery) by e -mail. You do not need to demonstrate anything. He writes in the afternoon, reads Moneta and continues to believe that the medicine of the future will have to integrate biology, history, narration and technology.
At the end of the interview, after a long pause, he adds a half smile: “Sometimes I feel that I haven’t received what I was looking for. But I think this is what made me be awake. Medicine is not an answer, this is a search. ” And then the teacher gets up, almost full of his cup of tea, for example, who finished not an interview, but a musical play that had to be affected with pace fair.