Calle del Doctor Mata

The calle del Doctor Mata, in the heart of Embajadores, owes its neighbourhood to a building rather than to its residents. Barely over a hundred metres, it joins calle de Atocha with calle de Santa Isabel. Its façades face the side of the old General Hospital and the Royal College of San Carlos, today a museum. That is why, towards the end of the 19th century, the local streets filled with doctors. Pedro Mata studied medicine in Barcelona and, after taking part in a Progressive uprising, ended up exiled in Paris. There he worked alongside Orfila, founder of modern toxicology, and from that apprenticeship drew the model he would introduce in Spain. Back home, at barely thirty-two, he held the first chair of Legal Medicine at the Central University of Madrid, a post he would not give up until his death, and wrote the Treatise of Legal Medicine and Surgery that was a standard text for decades. Mata was not content with the white coat. He did journalism, published materialist essays and even gave a course at the Ateneo on a universal language that earned him a passing mention in Borges’s famous essay on John Wilkins. The Texeira map of 1656 labels the stretch with a word hard to decipher; then came calle de Jesús, and by 1898 the register already recorded Doctor Mata.

Pedro Mata lived in Madrid as a neighbor of the playwright Manuel Bretón de los Herreros. Bretón’s night-owl friends often mistook the door and pounded on Mata’s at odd hours. Fed up, Mata hung up a sign: “In this, my dwelling / no Bretón lives.” Bretón responded by handing out printed sheets among the neighbors: “In this neighborhood lives / a certain physician-poet / who at the foot of every prescription / writes Mata, and it’s true.” Mata closed the exchange with another epigram: “This physician-poet / who is so mistreated / does not see patients and does not prescribe, / and therefore does not kill (Mata).” The duel ended when Bretón moved away. In 1962, a medicine professor in Barcelona handed out Mata’s epigrams to his students to remember the founder of the discipline.