Obituary: Francisco Guerra Pérez-Carral

Francisco Guerra Pérez-Carral passed away on November 25, 2011, aged ninety-five, after an engaged and fruitful life. Born at Torrelavega (Cantabria) on November 19, 1916, he had virtually finished medical studies in London at the outbreak of the FSpanish Civil War. Committed to the Republican side, he left Spain in 1939 and established himself abroad as a pharmacologist, first at the National University of Mexico. Here, during the decade of the 1940s, in a laboratory on the second floor of the School of Medicine in Mexico City, he showed the effect of cardiac glycosides on ox myocardial myosin, increasing contractile strength by stimulating the release of phosphorus (Arch. Inst. Cardiol. Mex., 1946, 16, 449); his two collaborators, A. Veerkam and P. L. Eberstadt, curiously a Jew and a German anti-Semite, purified the myosin using a technique that Dr. Guerra had learned from the Spanish pharmacologist Tomas Alday Redonnet. He also investigated, among other things, the action of sodium salicylate inhibiting hyaluronidase (Duran Reynals's spreading factor) in rheumatic fever, and the effects of hallucinogenic drugs and benzol in the mechanisms of regulation of the central nervous system. Two of his books were of particular importance in this period, Métodos de Farmacología Experimental (1946) and Manual de Farmacología (1951); with the latter, he became the first author in Mexico to describe the new antibiotics and sulfa drugs and helped bring about the gradual decline in infant mortality in Mexico. In addition, he personally advised Mao Tse Tung in the organization and planning of hospitals and health centers in China during the Cultural Revolution in the 1950s.

In subsequent years, Dr. Guerra turned increasingly to the history of medicine, which he pursued at UCLA, Yale, and eventually London's Wellcome Institute, associating with figures such as Arturo Castiglioni, John F. Fulton, Henry E. Sigerist, and Chauncey D. Leake. He returned to Spain in early 1970 to accept a chair at the Universidad de Alcalá, where he eventually became Emeritus Professor. He was President of the International Society for the History of Medicine and Doctor honoris causa at several universities.

Francisco Guerra was the author of seventy books and monographs. His The Pre-Columbian Mind (1971) united his pharmacological and historical interests, but historians of medicine will know him best for his many bibliographies of the medical writings of the New World, beginning with his Bibliografía de la materia médica Mexicana (1950), his American Medical Bibliography 1639-1783 (1962), and culminating with his Bibliografía médica americana y filipina (1999). His passion for books resulted in a personal library of five thousand volumes, with incunabula of the fifteenth to the twentieth century, which he gave to the Complutensian University of Madrid; its range can be seen in Una biblioteca ejemplar: tesoros de la colección Francisco Guerra en la Biblioteca Complutense (2007). Toward the end of his life, he authored La Medicina en el exilio republicano (2003), which sets out the biographies of more than one thousand exiled veterinarians, dentists, clinicians, and pharmacists who, like him, left Spain after the Civil War of 1936-39.