Daniel Alcides Carrión García , was born in Cerro de Pasco on May 15, 1857. Son of the Ecuadorian doctor and lawyer Baltazar Carrión and Dolores García Navarro. He lost his father at the age of eight. He studied at the public school in Tarma and at the national school of Our Lady of Guadalupe in Lima. In 1877 he entered the Faculty of Sciences of the Universidad Nacional Mayor de San Marcos and in 1880 the Faculty of Medicine at the same university , being Manuel Odriozola dean, studying the respective studies until the fourth year. Among his teachers were doctors Leonardo Villar, José María Romero and the famous José Casimiro Ulloa, who had witnessed notable experiments in Paris; without forgetting his anatomy teacher Celso Bambarén, successor to Cayetano Heredia in the chair, and one of the propagators of positivism among his students. Carrión was a diligent student:in the Faculty of Sciences, created in 1866 with Antonio Raimondi as its first dean, he soaked up Darwinian evolutionism, Malthus's theories, Faraday's discoveries, Sadi Carnot's, Berzelius's, as well as of the brilliant triumphs of Sevet, Harvey, Bichot, Legallois and other scholars of the second half of the 19th century.
Start the Pacific War
When the war broke out between Peru and Chile, he provided medical services in the battle of Miraflores on January 15, 1881 , among the groups that attended the wounded in the confrontation from their aid stations. Shortly after, he did his externship at the Maison de Santé clinic, at the Santa Ana hospital and at the Lazaretto de Guía; he was an intern at the Dos de Mayo and San Bartolomé hospitals.
By this time he became interested in knowing the symptoms and clinical characteristics of the wart, deciding to experience the disease himself, inoculating himself with the germ of evil at the Dos de Mayo hospital, under the supervision of Dr. Evaristo M. Chavez, on August 27, 1885 . From that moment until forty days after he died, he followed the symptoms and the evolution of the illness step by step, thoroughly informing his fellow students:Casimiro Medina, Enrique Mestanza, Julián Arce, Mariano Alcedán, Ricardo Miranda. and Manuel Montero. Thanks to his sacrifice, it was proved that the so-called La Oroya fever and the wart had the same origin and that the disease was inoculable. Before he died, Dr. Ricardo Flores performed a blood count, checking the anemia caused by the inoculation of the germ.
Death of Daniel Alcides Carrión
He died on October 5, 1885 at the Maison de Santé . Between 1883 and 1885 he wrote his “Notes on the Peruvian wart” , recording the epidemiology, the diagnosis of the wart and nine case histories of the disease, published after his death. Not everyone initially recognized Carrión's sacrifice and there was no shortage of those who detracted from it, saying that his action could not be framed within positivist medicine, but rather within metaphysical medicine or folk medicine. Although the inoculation was modest and imperfect, it was the first medical experiment carried out in Peru.
Carrión's heroic sacrifice left its mark on the medical history of Peru and encouraged the development of other studies and research among Peruvian doctors in various fields. In 1886, a year after his death, the Peruvian wart was called Carrión's disease, at the initiative of his classmate Mariano Alcedán, and that is how it appears in the world medical pathology . To celebrate the centenary of his sacrifice (1985), Octavio Mongrut Muñoz published a biography of Carrión and the diary with the annotations from the inoculation of the virus until his death. Carrión, Unanue and Heredia are three luminaries of Peruvian medicine in the last century:the first for setting the first milestone in Peruvian medical research; the second for founding the Royal College of Medicine and Surgery of San Fernando; and the third for the creation of the Faculty of Medicine of Lima in 1856. By Law 25342 of October 7, 1991, the Congress of the Republic declared Daniel A. Carrión a National Hero . Likewise, in his homage, a hospital in Callao and a province in the department of Pasco bear his name.