| Content from Wikipedia under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license ⇔ Maps from OpenStreetMap under the ODbL license |
Sadí de Buen Lozano
Sadí de Buen Lozano | |
|---|---|
.jpg) Sadí de Buen Lozano in Navalmoral de la Mata, in 1925 | |
| Born | July 18, 1893 |
| Died | September 3, 1936 (aged 43) |
Sadí de Buen Lozano (Barcelona, July 18, 1893 – Córdoba, September 3, 1936) was a Spanish physician and scientist.
He was a parasitologist notable for his efforts in the study and eradication of malaria in Spain, as well as for having discovered the agent and the vector of Spanish relapsing fever, a form of borreliosis.[1]
He was shot by the rebel military at the beginning of the Spanish Civil War.[2]
Biography
The son of the eminent scientist and politician Odón de Buen y del Cos, founder of the Spanish Institute of Oceanography, he was born in Barcelona when his father held the Chair of Natural History at the University of Barcelona. His mother was Rafaela Lozano Rey, sister of Luis Lozano Rey, who would become an illustrious ichthyologist and Professor of Vertebrates at the University of Madrid. His brothers were Demófilo, an eminent jurist, magistrate and Professor of Civil Law; Fernando and Rafael, who stood out in oceanography; Víctor, an industrial and aeronautical engineer; and Eliseo, who also became a physician, earned his doctorate with a thesis on paludism, and collaborated in his research.
He had four children with Berta López de Heredia, one of the daughters of the Rioja winemaker López Heredia, creator of Viña Tondonia; they grew up in Mexico, where they arrived after the Civil War. Dr. Sadí de Buen López de Heredia became a prominent figure in ophthalmic pathology, and his brother Óscar, a civil engineer, received the National Civil Engineering Prize in Mexico in 1999.
Work
From 1920 Sadí de Buen trained in medical parasitology alongside the Italian-born researcher Gustavo Pittaluga Fattorini, professor of the specialty at the University of Madrid.[3] He specialized in the study of protozoal diseases, infectious diseases caused by protozoa, and of their transmission by arthropod vectors, from a practical perspective in which the goal was eradication.
He devoted his attention mainly to combating malaria or paludism, not only through basic research but also through practical action. He collaborated with Pittaluga in the work against malaria that the latter carried out first in Catalonia and then in Cáceres. He moved to the Alfonso XIII Institute of Hygiene, as a member of which he served on the Central Antimalarial Commission. From 1920 he directed the founding of 32 antimalarial dispensaries, and in 1924 he founded and directed the Antimalarial Institute of Navalmoral de la Mata, starting from the dispensary he himself had set up.[3]
With the help of his brother Fernando, a naturalist specializing in aquatic life, Sadí de Buen introduced into Europe the American species Gambusia affinis, a carnivorous fish native to the rivers that drain into the Gulf of Mexico. Gambusia is a carnivore that feeds near the surface, avidly devouring mosquito larvae. De Buen was able to identify the quebradas (streams with irregular flow) of Talayuela (Cáceres) as a suitable place for its acclimatization, which until then had proved impossible. From there a network of breeding ponds was set up in all the malarial provinces, and from there came the gambusia with which paludism was thereafter combated first in Italy, and then in the rest of Europe and in North Africa.[4]
Sadí de Buen also studied leprosy and leishmaniasis, a protozoal infection caused by Leishmania and transmitted by phlebotomine sand flies, which remains endemic in areas of the center of the Peninsula. De Buen described three new species of Phlebotomus.
Sadí de Buen discovered the bacterium Borrelia hispanica (=Treponema hispanica), which causes Spanish relapsing fever, an entity that he characterized.[5] He described not only the disease and the agent, but also the vector, Ornithodoros erraticus (=O. maroccanus), a tick of the family Ixodidae. The disease is characteristic of the Iberian Peninsula and northwestern Africa, and is related to another borreliosis, the one caused by Borrelia crocidurae, widespread across Africa, the Middle East and Central Asia.
He was a member of the Malaria Commission of the League of Nations and President of the Red Cross. He supervised the work of the Rockefeller Foundation in Italy and of the School of Tropical Medicine in India. He represented Spain at the malaria congresses held in Rome (1925) and Algiers (1930).[6]
Death
In 1931 he was appointed Director General of Health Institutions, becoming a trusted associate of Marcelino Pascua, Director General of Health, who sought to reform Spanish public health, and whom he replaced during his absences.[7]
De Buen was in Córdoba in July 1936, carrying out his research duties in the fight against malaria and as head of the Services of the Directorate General of Health, when he was arrested on July 23. He was shot by the insurgents on the night of September 2 to 3 against the walls of the San Rafael cemetery.
His death had wide repercussions in Europe, which must have influenced the release, through a prisoner exchange, of his father, Odón de Buen, whom the military rebellion had caught by surprise in Majorca.[8]
The efficient, though modest, Spanish antimalarial organization that De Buen had helped to build disappeared with the war, so that by 1942 malaria could be considered the most serious health problem in Spain, and a new structure had to be built almost from scratch.[3]
Moreover, the circumstances of Sadí de Buen's death contributed to the oblivion of his scientific work, which has only begun to be appreciated in recent years.
In 2023, in compliance with the Historical Memory Law, Sadí de Buen Lozano Street in Navalmoral de la Mata regained the name it had once borne, replacing Calvo Sotelo Street.[9] In that town he founded the Antimalarial Institute in 1924, in the building that today houses the local courts.
See also
References
- ↑ "FIEBRE RECURRENTE ESPAÑOLA". Revista Clínica Española (in español). October 31, 1954. Retrieved 2024-04-01.
- ↑ Giral, Francisco: Ciencia española en el exilio (1939-1989): el exilio de los científicos españoles, p. 186. Anthropos Editorial, 1994. On Google Books. Retrieved September 3, 2016.
- ↑ 3.0 3.1 3.2 Fernández Astasio, B. (2002) La erradicación del paludismo en España: aspectos biológicos de la lucha antipalúdica. Doctoral thesis, Complutense University of Madrid.
- ↑ De Buen, E. "Estudio experimental de algunas sustancias larvicidas antianofélica". Doctoral thesis. Medicina de los Países Cálidos. 1929. Vol. II. In Fernández Astasio, B. (2002)
- ↑ De Buen, S. (1926) Note préliminaire sur l'épidémiologie de la fièvre récurrente espagnole. Annales de Parasitologie Humaine et Comparée 4: 185-192.
- ↑ Fernández Astasio, B. (2024-05-09). "Buen Lozano, Sadí | Diccionario Biográfico de la Medicina Española" (in español). Retrieved 2024-09-04.
- ↑ Bernabeu Mestre, J. (2000) «La utopía reformadora de la Segunda República: la labor de Marcelino Pascua al frente de la Dirección General de Sanidad, 1931-1933.» Rev. Esp. Salud Publica vol.74, monogr.
- ↑ Chacón Torres, E.A. (2000) «Semblanza: Dr. Sadí de Buen López de Heredia.» Revista Médica del Hospital General de México, S.S. 6(83):213-214.
- ↑ PdE (2023-11-13). "Inauguración de la calle Sadí de Buen Lozano en Navalmoral de la Mata". Punto de Encuentro Navalmoral (in español). Retrieved 2023-11-25.
External links
- Los Oceanógrafos Españoles en el Exilio: la Familia De Buen y sus Aportaciones a la Ciencia Española y Mexicana (in Spanish)
- https://www.aytonavalmoral.es/areas-tematicas/cultura/coloquios-historico-culturales/ (Centenary of the fight against malaria. 2002) (in Spanish)
