Don McCullough
Hero
This statue caught my eye for its starkness in the middle of the pleasant, park-like Rambla Poblennou in Barcelona. Then I realized it is a pair of hands holding a sick or injured man. .
It is all the more interesting for the hero it memorializes: Dr Josep Truetta Raspall. And it captures the plaster cast treatments he developed for wounds.
From Wikipedia:
Josep Trueta i Raspall (1897–1977) was a Spanish medical doctor. As a Catalan nationalist, he was forced into exile to England after the Spanish Civil War, during which he had been the chief of trauma services for the city of Barcelona.
During World War II, he helped to organize medical emergency services there. His use of a new plaster cast method for the treatment of open wounds and fractures helped save a great number of lives during the war.
Trueta formed part of a group of Catalans exiled in the United Kingdom who denounced the situation of Catalonia under Franco's regime. He wrote The Spirit of Catalonia, a book aimed at explaining Catalan history to English-speaking society.
He was Professor of Orthopaedics at the University of Oxford. He retired in 1966, and returned to Catalonia.
The main hospital of Girona was named in his honour.
Hero
This statue caught my eye for its starkness in the middle of the pleasant, park-like Rambla Poblennou in Barcelona. Then I realized it is a pair of hands holding a sick or injured man. .
It is all the more interesting for the hero it memorializes: Dr Josep Truetta Raspall. And it captures the plaster cast treatments he developed for wounds.
From Wikipedia:
Josep Trueta i Raspall (1897–1977) was a Spanish medical doctor. As a Catalan nationalist, he was forced into exile to England after the Spanish Civil War, during which he had been the chief of trauma services for the city of Barcelona.
During World War II, he helped to organize medical emergency services there. His use of a new plaster cast method for the treatment of open wounds and fractures helped save a great number of lives during the war.
Trueta formed part of a group of Catalans exiled in the United Kingdom who denounced the situation of Catalonia under Franco's regime. He wrote The Spirit of Catalonia, a book aimed at explaining Catalan history to English-speaking society.
He was Professor of Orthopaedics at the University of Oxford. He retired in 1966, and returned to Catalonia.
The main hospital of Girona was named in his honour.