Time and misinformation permanently threaten to leave fundamental figures of our academic and intellectual history in oblivion, leaving behind an immense legacy of history that should contribute to our improvement as professionals and as people, because there is nothing that stimulates the self-esteem of a society more than the knowledge that it has contributed to laying the foundations for its development. In these times of incessant superficial stimuli, technological information and virtual interconnection, the great thinkers and scientists of the past have the opportunity to resurface through the effort we make to recover their memory and their works. In this sense, the biographical series "And who was"? of this blog of Spill Magisterial has been publishing, for a year and a half now, biographies of people who today only serve to call educational centers -schools or superiors- hospitals and avenues, but whose stories we do not know. This time we talk about one of the favorite sons of Huánuco, the land of lime and song:Hermilio Valdizán .
Hermilio Valdizán Medrano He was a Peruvian doctor specialized in the fields of psychiatry and neurology. Valdizán's great merit lies in having studied and practiced these two branches of medicine that deal with the always complex structure of life experience and the human soul, determining factors in the formation of the individual's personality, when in the Peru there were almost no experts or scholars on the subject. Very few people know that, in our country, Psychiatry Day is celebrated on the same day of the birth of this committed doctor.
Hermilio Valdizán He was born on November 20, 1885 in Huánuco. The future doctor began his primary studies at the age of 5 in his hometown, but he finished his school education in Lima after his family decided to move to the capital in 1894. At the age of 18, he began his medical studies at the University National Mayor of San Marcos, from where he graduated as a Bachelor six years later, with his thesis Crime in Peru .
Hermilio Valdizán He was a friend of the main intellectuals in Lima at the beginning of the 20th century. With the remembered poet and narrator Abraham Valdelomar, he cultivated a friendship that even led them to meet in Rome, the capital of Italy, in 1914, during an internship of the young doctor.
Upon his return to Peru, he obtained the degree of Doctor of Medicine with a complex thesis that dealt with the subject of mental alienation in the primitive Peruvians. Valdizán was the first professor of the Psychiatry and Neuropathology course in Peru, even giving classes on what the essence of psychiatry means and the methods of treating patients with mental problems.
Valdizán, who over the years would come to be considered the Father of Peruvian Psychiatry , he also carried out a study of the history of national medicine, being his first great contribution to this matter his work The Faculty of Medicine of Lima (1913), an extensive treatise on what until then had meant the teaching of medicine in Peru. In this work, Valdizán dedicated several of his chapters to describe how the instruction of medical students developed in the times of the conquest, the colony and the republic.
Perhaps Valdizán's most valuable contribution to the understanding of mental illness has been the creation of the first outpatient clinic for mental and nervous conditions and disorders at Hospital Dos de Mayo, in addition to of having introduced the teaching of the same subject at the Universidad Nacional Mayor de San Marcos in 1916.
Valdizán opposed the treatment of the mentally ill with methods that he considered inhumane, such as the use of straitjackets and traps. As an innovative proposal, he proposed the use of more scientific procedures that would allow the mentally ill individual to achieve long-term healing of the soul.
One facet that he knew how to combine very well with that of his medical vocation was that of a journalist. He wrote articles in the newspaper El Tiempo , always backed by scientific verifications, related to medicine, which he signed under the pseudonym X.X. In The Press , another well-known newspaper of the time, he used the pseudonym of Juan Serrano . Another of his contributions to medical literature was the first volume of the Dictionary of Peruvian Medicine , published in 1923.
Valdizán was also very well informed about the healing methods of the Andean and jungle populations, which were far from traditional coastal medicine. The Peruvian wart, better known as (Daniel Alcides) Carrión's disease, its consequences and mental complications, was thoroughly studied by Valdizán.
Among the main works of the first Peruvian psychiatrist, it is worth mentioning:Crime in Peru (1909), Sexual perversions in the primitive Peruvians (1911), Psychiatry in Peru (1912), Cologne Madmen (1919), Peruvian folk medicine (1922), History of patients (1923), Towards a reform of medical studies (1928), Medical Chronicles (1929) and History of Peruvian medicine (1944, posthumous work).
Doctor Hermilio Valdizán he died on December 25, 1929, from a heart condition.