Calle del Doctor Castelo
It takes its name from Eusebio Castelo y Serra (Segovia, 1825 – Madrid, 1892), a physician specializing in syphilology who practiced for decades at the Hospital of San Juan de Dios, whose grounds are now occupied by the Gregorio Marañón Hospital. The city council dedicated the street to him in 1908, replacing the earlier name Calle de Mallorca.
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.
Its names
- Calle de MallorcaSiglo 19th – 1908