Calle Andrés Tamayo

Behind this sign hides a seventeenth-century Madrid physician with a book title so outlandish it deserves to be read slowly. Andrés Tamayo served as court physician and surgeon to Philip IV, and in 1625 embarked as doctor of the fleet that Fadrique de Toledo Osorio took to retake Salvador de Bahia. His main work came off the press in Madrid in 1621 with a name that baffles today: Tratado breve de álgebra y garrotillo. Nothing to do with mathematics or head colds. In the medical language of the time, “álgebra” named the art of resetting broken bones and “garrotillo” was laryngeal diphtheria, the kind that suffocates. The name reached the Guindalera, a colony developed in the eastern expansion from the 1890s that named its streets after illustrious figures of Madrid. The calle de Andrés Tamayo fits that pattern, though the exact municipal decision that named the street does not appear in the primary sources.