DYNAMIS. Acta Hisp. Med. Sci. Hist. Illus. 2006, 26, 323-366.

David Simón LORDA. Médicos ourensáns represaliados na guerra civil e na posguerra: Historias da «longa noite de pedra», Santiago de Compostela, Fundación 10 de marzo, 2002.

It is often the case that short books, from local or small publishers, in this case from the Fundación 10 de marzo, in association with the trade union Comisiones Obreras, are engaged in the front line of what has now come be known as the process of the recuperation of historical memory. This short but detailed book by David Lorda illustrates the neglected history of the repression of medical figures, often affiliated to republican or leftist parties or unions, during the Civil War and its iniquitous aftermath.
Before receiving this book to review, I had been fortunate enough to see an exhibition of life drawings by Simon Manfield, who observed and drew the various stages of the exhumation of unmarked graves of doctors, nurses and medical orderlies who worked in the psychiatric institute at Valdediós, Asturias, and who were assassinated by Nationalist troops in 1937. Manfield’s drawings of the disinterred graves and of the relatives and workers at the site where these medical figures lay provides yet another stirring example of injustice on the one hand and of voice given to sepulchred silence on the other.
Lorda’s book benefits from a prologue written by Carlos Castilla del Pino who reinforces the sense of historical justice that texts like this encapsulate. History, Castilla del Pino notes, is a moral question because it is a question of justice (p. 15). The very subtitle of Lorda’s book is taken from a book of poems written by Celso Emilio Ferreira (1914-1979) during his incarceration during the Civil War (p. 21).
Lorda began his task from a perspective of «microhistorical» investigation of the archives that have survived the Civil War period in Ourense, despite being impeded in his task by the lack of archive for the Colexio de Médicos de Ourense. Even though the author did not use the Archivo General de la Administración (AGA) in Alcalá de Henares for his work, what we have before us constitutes a detailed historical account of the people that made up the world of republican medicine in Ourense and their various political affiliations. We are introduced to the protagonists of this story, with small biographies of each medical figure, we learn of their fate during the Civil War and the facts behind their «depuración» in the post-Civil War months. In this sense, it can be said that the book is strongest on the details of these doctors and their variety of professional activities than it is on the reconstruction of the nature of medicine in Ourense in the years 1931-1939. For example, there is a large section on the «depuración» in the Hospital Provincial at the end of 1936, which was accused of having introduced «un estado soviético o un régimen libertario» (p. 46) by the new authorities, and whose personnel’s fate is presented in table form, together with name, position in the hospital, political affiliation, details of repression suffered (often dismissal and/or prison) and dates (p. 48). Such methods are then utilised to paint a broader picture of repression in the province. However, it is fair to say that the overall pre-Civil War picture of medical practice, ideological leanings and possible innovatory measures so characteristic of the Republic is not particularly clearly painted. More work on these local details is required. A section on the Colexio de Médicos (pp. 53-56), which could have come before, does nevertheless detail the problem of sources hampering his account.
Where we do gather more details of the medical and social world of Ourense is in the extensive individual biographies of medical figures who suffered repression in the Civil War and post-war period in Ourense (pp. 55-91) and in Galicia as a whole (pp. 93-111). The arbitrary nature of the Nationalist repression is a well known fact but some examples will illustrate this more clearly. In the case of Laureano Gómez Paratcha, a doctor from Pontevedra, his activities as parliamentary deputy for the regionalist ORGA in 1932, and as Minister of Industry and Commerce in Lerroux’s government cost him twelve years in prison, before emigrating to Buenos Aires, only to return to Spain the following year (p. 69). Carlos Guitián Fábrega was a doctor in the Hospital Provincial de Ourense in charge of the venereal disease section. Known to the insurgents to be a member of the Partido Galeguista and a local trade union he was investigated but not actually dismissed from his post (p. 70). José Pardo Babarro, eye doctor and anarchist, who wrote the «Sexuality» section of the anarchist review Brazo y Cerebro, was mobilized to the Front where he perished (pp. 78-80). Doctors form the bulk of those who suffered reprisals, from Lorda’s account, and it would have been interesting to have discussed differences in treatment with regard to nurses and other medical staff. The lack of women in this account could have merited some kind of special attention; we assume that repression of a broader range of medical orderlies and female nurses, for example, is a task still to be undertaken.
Some of the most striking material presented in this volume includes the reproduction of photographs of the accused, memos from the committees charged with processing their «depuración» and records of hearings instigated by the new Nationalist authorities. Although photographs, as Susan Sontag wrote, can be used as a tool of surveillance, on the other hand they can furnish us with evidence. The names, biographies and photographs of individuals in prisons around Galicia, become a way of being able «to collect the world… Photographs really are experience captured, and the camera is the ideal arm of consciousness in its acquisitive mood» (2). For those caught in the repression of the Francoist state, they aid in researching their fate or, as Castilla del Pino writes, they do justice to the recording of their history: «Hai que seguir investigando. Hai que reescribi-la nosa Historia» (p. 16), he urges in the last words of his prologue.

RICHARD CLEMINSON
University of Leeds