Avenida de Pedro Mata

Pedro Mata y Fontanet was born in Reus in 1811 and studied medicine in Barcelona, but his mark was left in the courts as much as in the lecture halls. He turned Spanish forensic medicine into a serious discipline: he argued that justice needed doctors able to read a corpse or a poison with the rigor a judge reads a legal code. In 1843 he held the first chair of Forensic Medicine at Madrid’s Universidad Central and pushed for the creation of a corps of medical examiners. His life spilled beyond the white coat. He was mayor of Barcelona in his early thirties, a member of parliament, civil governor of Madrid and a senator, and he sat on the commission that drafted the 1869 Constitution. He also wrote novels, treatises on toxicology, and a work on a universal language that Borges later revisited in an essay. He died in Madrid in 1877 and rests in the San Justo cemetery. The city remembers him twice over: this avenida de Pedro Mata in Nueva España and the central calle del Doctor Mata, beside the old Hospital General.