Calle del Doctor Huertas

Behind the sign is a doctor who changed what Spanish apothecaries kept in their drawers. Francisco Huertas Barrero was born in Alcuéscar, in the province of Cáceres, in 1847, into a family without means. He studied secondary school in Madrid and took his medical degree at the College of San Carlos, where he earned his doctorate in 1876. He practised first in a village in Badajoz before returning to Madrid and joining the municipal charity service. He ended up running an internal medicine ward at the General Hospital and gathering nearly every honour of the profession: full member of the Royal National Academy of Medicine and senator of the Realm representing the Academy itself. The detail that fixes him in memory came in 1899. No sooner had the discovery of acetylsalicylic acid been announced in Germany than Huertas brought the first samples of that compound to Spain. He is remembered as the first doctor to prescribe aspirin in the country, a pill that was then a laboratory novelty and now sleeps in every medicine cabinet. The calle del Doctor Huertas, short and discreet, falls beside the plaza de Castilla.