Calle del Doctor Castelo

Calle del Doctor Castelo runs between the Avenida de Menéndez Pelayo and the Calle del Doctor Esquerdo, in the Ibiza district of the Retiro borough. Before that it was Calle de Mallorca: the city council had handed out names from the Balearic archipelago among several parallel streets —⁠Menorca, Ibiza⁠— long before one of those islands ended up naming the whole neighborhood. The change came in 1908 to honor Eusebio Castelo y Serra, a Segovian born in 1825 and dead in Madrid in 1892. In 1857 he won a competitive post at the Hospital of San Juan de Dios, where he devoted himself to syphilology. There, alongside José Eugenio de Olavide, he gathered the pieces of a Museum of Pathological Anatomy that would be the seed of the future Olavide Museum. His career culminated at the Royal National Academy of Medicine, which he came to preside over after being elected in 1890 by the narrowest margin imaginable: ten votes to nine. He led the body until his death, two years later.

At the inaugural session of the 1868 academic year, Castelo delivered before the Royal Academy of Medicine an address on three poems dedicated to syphilis: that of López de Villalobos (in Spanish), that of Fracastoro (in Latin), and that of Barthélemy (in French). The text, forty printed pages long, was received as a display of exceptional erudition and reflects the dual role of physician and man of letters that Castelo cultivated all his life. His admission address to the Academy (1861) had dealt precisely with the need for physicians to be men of letters as well.