All rooms are equipped with an overhead projector
Rooms C, D, E, F, G and H (H only on Saturday): slide projector (framed slides, carrousel. There are extra carrousels available to set up your presentation in advance)
Rooms C, D, M, N, O, U and Committee Room 2: beamer to connect your laptop. You have to bring you own laptop. (If you want to use your Apple notebook, please contact us, as it may be incompatible.)
Rooms C, T and U: VCR
Programme
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Gustavo Pittalugia (1876-1956): Science as a weapon for social reform in time of crisis
| Gustavo Pittaluga (Florence, 1876; Havanna, 1956) was a key-man in the development of public health in the first third of 20th century Spain, as well as for the fields of parasitology and haematology. He was the early parasitologist hired by the National Institute of Health (1906 to 1924), and his teachings drove to the diagnosis of Kala-azar disease in children and to the full depiction of a Spanish recurrent fever. He won the first chair on Parasitology and Tropical Diseases at the Madrid University (1911) and he opened several laboratories and consulting rooms for teaching, care and research in haematology (from 1916 on). We can judge that his role in the sustaining of laboratory based approach to the problems of health and disease, under Spain’s Nobel prized Santiago Ramón y Cajal’s paramount shadow, is stronger than his influence in any particular field. Moreover, he played a connecting role with the international sphere of health experts through the League of Nations Health Organisation, where he sat as permanent representative of Spain from its founding and until the start of the Spanish Civil War in July 1936. By mood, strategy and aims he belonged to the fruitful generations of concerned educated people that pushed on the full-fledged modernisation programme —or, as it was used to say at the time, europeisation of Spain— that was cut off by the Civil War and its aftermath; for instance, he was a close friend to the philosopher José Ortega y Gasset, whom he joined in several of his political enterprises, like the League for Political Education of the People or the weekly journal called Spain, while at the same time he formed in the ranks of the first Spanish League for Human Rights. At the beginning of the Civil War, pressures from the left pushed him away Spain, although at the end of the war he reinforced his personal engagement with the defeated Republic. But the Nazis drove him away from France to Cuba, where he finally settled and contributed to the strengthen of science and culture, as so many other thousands of Spaniards were doing throughout Latin America and especially in Mexico.
This paper will review the multilayered interests of Pittaluga, his endeavours and personal contributions, as an example of the liberal minds in science that shaped the interwar years.
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