Calle del Doctor Arce

The doctor who gives this street its name never operated in Madrid nor lived in El Viso. José Arce was born in Lobería, in the province of Buenos Aires, in 1881, and graduated in medicine with a gold medal at twenty-two. He became one of the most renowned surgeons in the Americas and rector of the University of Buenos Aires between 1922 and 1926, as well as a deputy and an ambassador. His mark on Spain was not surgical but academic. Arce promoted the exchange of professors between Buenos Aires and the European universities, with particular effort toward the Spanish ones, and that work as a cultural bridge explains why his name crossed the Atlantic to the Madrid street plan. The house he had built as his residence ended up donated to the State and turned into today’s Roca Museum in Buenos Aires. The stretch that keeps the sign Calle del Doctor Arce measures barely fifty metres, in the El Viso of the 1930s, that neighbourhood of rationalist villas built for professionals and intellectuals.