Calle del Doctor Laguna

Calle del Doctor Laguna crosses the Niño Jesús district, a piece of expansion that sprang up southeast of the Retiro Park around the Niño Jesús Hospital, opened on 1 January 1877. Almost every street nearby bears the surnames of doctors and scientists, so the naming falls in the last quarter of the 19th century or the first decades of the 20th. The best-documented name behind the plaque is Andrés Laguna (Segovia, c. 1510 – Guadalajara, 1559), a humanist physician, pharmacologist and botanist who took his doctorate in Bologna. He attended popes Paul III and Julius III, as well as Charles I and Philip II. His major work was the Castilian version of Dioscorides, printed in Antwerp in 1555; for more than two centuries no Spanish apothecary could do without it. Some accounts have tried to see another Laguna in the street, Máximo Laguna y Villanueva, a forestry engineer and botanist, though he never held a medical degree. No record survives to settle the matter, so the doubt still stands.