When I did my master’s degree in sexuality, I discovered how important the figure of Gregorio Marañón was in something that is now widely talked about: intersexuality. Despite his deep religious convictions, he was one of the first champions of sexual education in … adults. The capital importance of this section in our lives and how fundamental the sexual characteristics of humans are.
This interest led him to join the World League for Scientific Sexual Reform. The Germans Magnus Hirschfeld, Havelock Ellis and Auguste Foret were members of it. Marañón was president of this league in Spain. His secretary was the famous Hildegart Rodríguez, whose life was abruptly cut short by her own mother. But that is another story that we will tell another day.
This is just one aspect of his rich collection of concerns and passions, as he was also a magnificent biographer. His idea for approaching patients’ illnesses was to study their entire context. He assured Don Gregorio that the chair was the best invention in history. In it he sat people suffering from various illnesses and diagnosed them from a psychosocial approach. It is said that he was the creator of psychosomatic medicine and that humanistic aspect never left him. Thousands of notes are preserved from patients with various illnesses. A treasure for those who have come after.
Marañón was born into a well-off family. A home where opposing ideas were debated: Galdós, Menéndez Pelayo and José Mª Pereda would discuss over coffee. Intelligent people are capable of understanding each other if they find a common ground. This breeding ground is fundamental to his attitude, which always avoided confrontation. He studied medicine and discovered the lamentable state of some hospitals in Spain. He went to Europe to gain experience and there he made contact with Flemming, who would help him in one of his first national tasks: combating infectious diseases, especially syphilis.
In 1909 he was awarded a prize that opened his entry to the Academy of Medicine with a work on typhus. His recent academic colleagues are surprised to learn that the award-winner is still studying his degree.
By then, he was already in a relationship with the love of his life, Dolores Moya. A very happy couple according to those who knew them. They say that she was his great driving force.
His trip to Las Hurdes with Alfonso XIII on horseback opened his eyes to the profound poverty of some places in Spain. This population ate neither protein nor fruit, and basically fed on the poor vegetables that the land provided, whose lack of iodine marked their -almost always- short lives. The improvements introduced by the doctor helped to eliminate infant mortality and to help women have healthy children.
His studies on endocrinology are transcendental and it is at this stage of his life when he concludes that the physical and mental life of humans needs balance. That passion for the secrets of the human soul was the heartbeat of all of his medical treatises, but also of his exquisite biographies. Or that study on ‘Don Juan’, very important to understand the attitudes of some narcissists.
In his home, Serrano 43, some prominent men gathered together to negotiate the departure of the monarch and the establishment of a republic, in the most peaceful way possible. Marañón felt it was a betrayal that the king himself encouraged Primo de Rivera’s coup, but he was always open to dialogue. “The man who does not doubt is a danger to others,” he assured.
Perhaps his attitude was received as lukewarm by the Republic. Marañón was taken by a Czech and the next day he left Spain. His life was in danger. He spent four years in Paris. He returned for his children and continued with his activities. The regime found him useful and did not care much about his political ideas. After that he worried about the Spaniards in exile.
Gregorio and the spaces he created for dialogue and art are surprising: García Lorca, Machado, Curie and politicians of the time, greet us from the daguerreotypes taken in his beloved Toledo Cigarralejo.
