Fidel Pagés

Fidel Pagés Miravé (born January 26, 1886 in Huesca , † September 21, 1923 in Quintanapalla ) was a Spanish military doctor and developer of epidural anesthesia .

Life

Fidel Pagés was the son of Juan Pagés Maraque and Concepción Miravé Sesé, a middle class family in Huesca. The father died in 1893 and the mother remarried. In 1901 Pagés began studying medicine at the Universidad de Zaragoza in his native Huesca and graduated with honors in 1908. During this time he learned German .

Pagés visiting an injured person at Docker Hospital in Melilla (1909).

In the same year he joined the Medical Corps of the Ejército de Tierra and, after a year in the Military Medical Academy, was sent to Melilla in July 1909 in the rank of Second Doctor in the Rif War . The Spanish army had suffered great losses and Pagés was part of the medical reinforcement that set up several emergency hospitals in the city. He stayed for two years, during which he initially worked as a surgical assistant doctor and after the end of the war he set up medical stations in the mountains and trained recruits. In the meantime he was in the Carabanchel Gómez Ulla military hospital for a few months .

In 1911 he left Melilla after being promoted to the rank of First Physician and served in Tarragona , Toledo , Madrid, Ciudad Real and again in Madrid in the following years . In 1912 he published in The Fight Against Infectious Diseases in War analyzes of techniques he had used in Melilla and developed by Japanese doctors during the Russo-Japanese War . In 1913 he received his doctorate from the Complutense University of Madrid . In the same year he married Berta Concepción Bergenmann y Quirós, a Spanish woman with German ancestry, and was posted to Mahón . In 1915 he returned to Madrid to work in the Ministry of Defense , a brief stint took him to Alicante . In the same year he became chief physician of the Hospital Provincial de Madrid . His reputation grew and he met Queen María Cristina several times . In 1917 he inspected Austro-Hungarian prisoner -of- war camps during the First World War because of his knowledge of German and his experience as a military doctor . During this time he also worked in military hospital No. 2 in Vienna .

Pagés was probably familiar with the German and French medical literature about the anesthesia in the epidural space (also known as epidural space), which was carried out for the first time in the USA in 1885, and was in contact with German surgeons in Vienna who had already experimented with the technology. After Pagés returned to Madrid, he worked at the Hospital General in Madrid, published several professional articles and became editor-in-chief of the Revista de Sanidad Militar . He also worked again in the Ministry of Defense. In 1919, together with the doctor Ramírez de la Mata, he founded the Revista Española de Cirugía (Spanish Journal of Surgery), in which he published numerous comments and articles on anesthesia, for example on Samuel Meltzer's endotracheal anesthesia, Louis Ombrédanne's ether inhaler, first described in 1908, Friedrich Trendelenburg's cannula, Victor Horsley's hedonal intravenous anesthesia and Gustave Le Filliatre's total spinal anesthesia. In 1920 Pagés was transferred to the Hospital Militar de Urgencia de Madrid , and briefly returned to Melilla in 1921 as part of the Battle of Annual .

Original drawing by Fidel Pagés on the technique of epidural anesthesia .

In 1921 the article Anestesia metamérica , which appeared in both the Revista Española de Cirugía and the Revista de Sanidad Militar , described the epidural anesthesia used in an operation he carried out in 1920. He drew on the experience of 43 operations carried out. Although he was stationed in a military hospital in Madrid in 1920, he briefly experienced the aftermath of the Battle of Annual , Desastre de Annual on July 22, 1921 in Melilla . In 1922 he was promoted to Comandante Médico.

Pagés died on September 21, 1923 as a result of a car accident near Quintanapalla on the way back to Madrid from family vacation in Cestona ( Guipúzcoa ).

reception

His work was subsequently forgotten and was not noticed outside the Spanish-speaking area. In 1931 the Italian doctor Achille Mario Dogliotti published on epidural anesthesia, which he had developed independently of Pagés, and was subsequently honored for several years as its discoverer. It was not until a few years later that an Argentine scientific newspaper came across Pagé's publications, and Dogliotti and the professional world recognized Pagé's achievement.

Awards

• 1923: Commemorative plaque in the Hospital Militar de Urgencia de Madrid
• 1923: Commemorative plaque in the military hospital in San Sebastián
• 1926: Renaming of the Docker Hospital in Melilla to Pagés
• 2007: Award of the Premio a la Investigación en Sanidad Militar Fidel Pagés Miravé by the Spanish Ministry of Defense
• Every two years the Sociedad Española de Anestesiología, Reanimación y Terapéutica del Dolor (SEDAR) awards the Fidel Pagés Prize

Fonts

• The fight against infectious diseases in war. 1912.
• Anestesia metamérica. In: Revista Española de Cirugía and Revista de Sanidad Militar. 1921.

Web links

• SEDAR

Individual evidence

1. ↑ ^{a b c d} I. Velázquez Rivera, M. Ramón Rodríguez, A. Robledo Aguilar: Fidel Pagés Miravé, cirujano militar . In: Medicina Militar . tape 59 , no. 3 . Madrid 2003, p. 205–206 (Spanish, portalcultura.mde.es ( memento of March 7, 2012 in the Internet Archive ) [PDF; accessed on May 26, 2010]).
2. ^ A. Herrera, M. de las Mulas: In memoriam Fidel Pagés Miravé (1886-1923) on the 75th anniversary of the publication of "Anesthesia metamérica" . In: Revista española de anestesiología y reanimación . tape 43 , no. 2 , February 1996, p. 59-66 , PMID 8869650 .
3. ↑ ^{a b} J. C. Diz, A. Franco, DR Bacon, J. Ruprecht, J. Alvarez (eds.): The history of anesthesia: proceedings of the Fifth International Symposium . Elsevier, 2002, ISBN 0-444-51003-6 , pp. 205-206 ( books.google.com ).
4. ↑ Christoph Weißer: Anesthesia. In: Werner E. Gerabek, Bernhard D. Haage, Gundolf Keil, Wolfgang Wegner (eds.): Enzyklopädie Medizingeschichte. De Gruyter, Berlin 2005, ISBN 3-11-015714-4 , p. 54 f., Here: p. 54.
5. ^ Rudolf Frey , Otto Mayrhofer , with the support of Thomas E. Keys and John S. Lundy: Important data from the history of anesthesia. In: R. Frey, Werner Hügin , O. Mayrhofer (Ed.): Textbook of anesthesiology and resuscitation. Springer, Heidelberg / Basel / Vienna 1955; 2nd, revised and expanded edition. With the collaboration of H. Benzer. Springer-Verlag, Berlin / Heidelberg / New York 1971. ISBN 3-540-05196-1 , pp. 13-16, here: pp. 14 f.
6. ^ Orden del Ministerio de Defensa, por la que se crea el premio "Fidel Pagés Miravé". ( Memento of the original from September 30, 2007 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was automatically inserted and not yet checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.