Avenida del Doctor Federico Rubio y Galí

Federico Rubio y Galí was born in El Puerto de Santa María in 1827 and trained in Cádiz, Montpellier and Paris alongside some of the leading European surgeons of the day, before returning to Seville to attempt in the operating room what no one here had tried. He succeeded. In 1860 he performed Spain’s first removal of an ovary, followed by the first of the uterus, kidney and larynx. That chain of firsts earned him the nickname “prince of surgery” and proved that operations thought impossible could be done in Spanish hospitals. His mark went beyond the scalpel. In 1896 he opened the School of Saint Elizabeth of Hungary, the first in Spain devoted to training lay nurses, tied to his institute in Moncloa, toward which this avenue points. He died in Madrid in 1902, a day after turning seventy-five.