Spain
Spain was first visited in 1953, the visit to Madrid being organised by Dr Martinez Alonso, who had a Glaswegian accent and cornada (bullfighting) scars on his legs. The hospitals seen included the private Rubor Nursing Home, the Institute of Industrial Medicine with its 120 beds, and the Red Cross Hospital where the Society met the President of the Red Cross, la Duquesa de la Victoria de Luchana. Here Martinez Alonso removed intact a hydatid cyst from the lung (to appreciative cries of “Olé”) and said three or so such cases were seen each week.
In 1968 the Society visited Barcelona, staying at the Hotel Colon as they did on the next visit in 1994, on both occasions visiting the Hospital de la Santa Cruz y San Pablo, built before the First World War and said to be an attempt by the architect to “out-Gaudi Gaudi”. In 1968 the host was Professor Soler Roig of whom it was said that “his prosperity appeared fabulous, as indeed it might be in a country where the income tax paid one year was allowed as an expense in the next”.
In 1994 our host at the same hospital was the urbane Professor Jordi Puig la Calle, and we also toured L’Hospital del Mar (which had performed the drug testing for the Barcelona Olympics in 1992) and Barcelona’s vast University Hospital, in some need of renovation. The visit to Valencia in 1976 had been sadly marred by Spain’s first strike of hospital ancillary staff.
However, there was excellent hospitality in Cordoba in 1987 when the Society had a meeting at the Reina Sophia Hospital, and an internal one at a Parador in Antequera. For this the Society was based in Gibraltar, where it visited St Bernard’s Hospital (courtesy of Mr D J Toomey) and the Royal Naval Hospital.