The cursed destiny of the museum of probably the most unlucky folks on the planet: from an Aerobic room to be expelled from the Complutense | Science | EUROtoday

The Complutense University of Madrid has determined to expel from its amenities one of the vital distinctive drugs historical past collections on the planet, the Olavide Museum, an genuine sanctuary of bizarre hyperrealist sculptures. Its origin is in Madrid’s Calle de Atocha, the place an hell on earth was till 1897. There the San Juan de Dios hospital rose, specialised in serving poor folks with dreadful pores and skin illnesses, particularly sexually transmitted, similar to syphilis, which was primed with prostitutes. Hundreds of these sufferers, typically was intercourse slaves from women, had been immortalized in terrifying wax statues by the daddy of Spanish dermatology, José Eugenio Olavide, and his colleagues, to show drugs to their college students. There are additionally beggars with tune, day laborers with psoriasis, masons with leprosy, sewer cleaners with contaminated wounds, laundries with their palms destroyed a lot washed.

The director of the museum, the dermatologist Pablo Lázaro, is outraged. “It seems unpresentable that a Museum of History of Medicine, which is a living demonstration of the teaching method, ends on the street. It is not receipt,” he laments. The exhibition held 560 sq. meters up to now, transferred by the Complutense University since 2014, within the semi -abandoned basements of the Faculty of Medicine. On May 22, the Spanish Academy of Dermatology and Venereology, custody of the gathering, acquired an official notification, wherein the college supervisor, Ana María Cantalejo, urges “the unemployment” pressing of the amenities, “as well as to the withdrawal of the objects located there” earlier than the tutorial yr ends. The Complutense, suffocated by the cuts of the federal government of Isabel Díaz Ayuso, argues that “for economic and organizational reasons” has to dedicate that house to “other academic uses”, in line with the letter, to which the nation has had entry.

The “objects located”, because the supervisor calls them, are greater than 670 wax figures of the unlucky sufferers of the San Juan de Dios Hospital, who collectively represent what’s probably the one museum of sculpture of poor folks on the planet. The author and physician Pío Baroja described that home in his guide THE TREE OF SCIENCEprinted in 1911. “The sick were the most fallen and miserable. See so homeless, abandoned, in a black room, in a human stercolero; verify and show the rot that poisons sexual life, made him […] An anguishing impression. The hospital, already collapsed fortunately, was an unclean, dirty building, bad oliente; The rooms of the rooms gave to Atocha street and had, in addition to the bars, some wire for the held women not to look out and scandalize, ”Baroja stated.

The Madrid dermatologist José Eugenio Olavide (1836-1901) and his colleagues had been impressed by the Museum of Wax Figures of the Hospital of San Luis, in Paris. The two collections have had divergent trajectories. The Parisian was formally inaugurated in the course of the common exhibition of 1889, such because the Eiffel Tower, and there it’s nonetheless, in its spectacular authentic constructing, as a jewel within the historical past of medication. The Spanish has been mendacity down greater than a century. The first museum was inaugurated in 1882 within the already ruinous San Juan de Dios Hospital, which was deserted in 1897. Hundreds of wax statues of disfigured folks then got here out in procession alongside the road of Atocha, till its subsequent vacation spot, in a brand new constructing constructed close to the Retirement Park. When the Francoist authorities determined to knock him right down to carry the present Gregorio Marañón hospital there, in 1966, the figures obtained into containers in a ship in poor situation and forgot.

The assortment then belonged to the Provincial Council, the predecessor establishment of the Community of Madrid. In 2002, a excessive place requested the Museum of Forensic Anthropology of the Complutense – a Variopinta exhibition, with Egyptian mummies, human skulls, weapons of actual crimes and even a vile membership – that may handle the wax figures. In 2005, the gathering moved to the headquarters of the Spanish Academy of Dermatology and Venereology, in Madrid. And at Christmas that very same yr one other 120 containers with extra sculptures had been situated on the Niño Jesús hospital. The conservatives David Aranda and Amaya Maruri, who started as volunteers to revive the figures within the Complutense 21 years in the past, report the Rocambolesco itinerary adopted by the gathering since then: a nursery in Torrejón de Ardoz, a scorching truck wherein some figures melted, one other stage sooner or later gymnasium of Chamberí, an previous Aerobic room in Leganés.

The Spanish Academy of Dermatology and Venereology and the Complutense University lastly reached an settlement to rescue the Olavide Museum greater than a decade, with the impulse of the dermatologist Luis Conde Salazar, who died two months in the past. The then rector, the mathematician Carlos Andradas, introduced as a milestone the reopening in December 2016. “For us it is a pleasure and a privilege to gather in the Complutense, in the best faculty of medicine in the country, heiress of the first centers of medical studies, this collection of the Olavide museum. For us, in addition, it is a first step of a project that we have been caregling for a long time, as it is to create a large time, as it is to The wonderful treasures that our museums and collections have, ”Andradas proclaimed, who was rector till 2019, when it was occurred by the veterinarian Joaquín Goyache. That museum challenge of Medicine died instantly as a consequence of lack of price range, personnel and house, in line with a spokeswoman for the Complutense. And the treasure of Spanish dermatology now stays on the street.

“We are not an institution with an economic power to have a space at will,” explains the director of the museum. “This has caught us for betrayal, couldn’t they have spoken before with us?” The settlement between the Academy and the Complutense expired in 2020, when the Covid pandemic paralyzed humanity. The museum director says that he met with Vice Chancellor Isabel García Fernández on October 4, 2023 to request an extension, however the settlement was by no means renewed.

This newspaper visited the Olavide Museum on March 28, to arrange a report on its agony within the basements of the Faculty of Medicine, stuffed with leaks. Its web site, a sort of previous deserted hospital with lengthy corridors, is so gloomy that the complute rents neighboring areas to shoot horror motion pictures, for as much as 10,000 euros a day. The producer of the American tv sequence has even been within the place The Walking Dead. Those accountable for the museum are held by three thieves incursions on this school pavilion, together with one wherein the assailants managed to enter the shops, with out inflicting injury. In September 2019, torrential rains flooded three exhibition rooms.

Conservatives David Aranda and Amaya Maruri clarify why the Olavide Museum is exclusive. The sculptors of the Madrid Hospital San Juan de Dios, underline, didn’t restrict themselves to reproducing the wax harm, as in Paris, however included a better portion of every affected person and, typically, their face. Aranda and Maruri stroll via the museum and switch 180 levels some figures. Behind the face is the medical historical past of every particular person, with the initials of their title and surname. It is an incredible window to life in nineteenth -century Spain.

The tales are dramatic, such because the one behind the determine of a lady along with her tongue outdoors, stuffed with ulcers: “NS, 21, single, pure of Seville, of nervous temperament, nicely constituted, with out morbid historical past by inheritance: he stated that having introduced the primary menstruation at age 12, and following a licentious life from that date, he contracted a number of situations: fulfill the venereal orgasm;

Another of the sculptures is from a whitish and intensely unhappy youngster: “MP, 7 -year -old boy, a native of Madrid, asylum at Hospicio, entered this hospital on June 14, 1881”. His head was stuffed with “coastal, wet and yellowish, of which an unbearable smell was detached, and coinciding with the eruption the development of parasites, the itching was even more unbearable and desperate.” The abuse now receives their wax statues is anecdotal in comparison with the vexations that these folks suffered in life.