He was born in Castillo de Fuentetétar (Jaén) on January 6, 1948 and died in Madrid on May 2, 2025
María Castellano Arroyo
Bachelor of Medicine in 1972, a doctorate in 1977, a professor in 1980, has been a reference for Spanish legal and forensic medicine for almost half a century.
The name of María Castellano Arroyo reached a certain dimension of popularity after becoming the object of a question of the trivial pursuit game. The reason was his status as a first woman who won a chair of Medicine in Spain. It was 1980, the country had just released its democracy, the Spanish woman began to complete her emancipation, which was already well advanced in the academic field, except at the highest university level of medicine.
Therefore, the Castilian professor – who had graduated in 1972 at the University of Granada and Doctorate five years later in the same institution – filled, with her feat, an important hole. He was not the only one: although without the same relevance as the chair, she was also the first woman to be part of the Central Commission of Deontology of the General Council of Official Medical Colleges, an almost endless name to designate an essential body of the profession.
But behind these statistical milestones, the Castilian professor was in possession of a remarkable trajectory whose beginnings date back to a stay the Institute of Legal Medicine of Liege where her research dealt with genetic-molecular markers applied to the investigation of fatherhood and the identification of biological indications. Back to Spain assumed the Headquarters for 16 years of the Legal Medicine and Toxicology Service of the Lozano Blesa Clinical Hospital Blesa de Zaragoza.
The Castilian professor compatible with these and other executive responsibilities with intellectual production – in their credit more than 300 articles appear in the various areas of legal and forensic medicine and more than 50 chapters of books specialized in Legal Medicine, Forensic Toxicology, Health Law, Ethics and Medical Deontology and Labor Medicine – and its predisposition towards new fields. One of them was that of domestic violence, in which, according to Medical writinghe tried, as a forensic doctor, 1485 aggressions denounced by women and always giving a vision about the danger of the aggressor to protect the victims.
A remarkable career that culminated in 2012 with his entered the Royal National Academy of Medicine. Although this time “alone” was the second woman.
