Calle del Doctor Piga

Before honouring a forensic doctor, this short, narrow street in the heart of Lavapiés owed its name to a church with a baffling nickname. It runs between calle del Salitre and calle de Argumosa, and at the corner with Salitre stands the parish of San Lorenzo, founded in 1662. The neighbourhood hung on it a nickname that stuck in memory: the “Temple of the Fleas”, after the wretchedness of the building. For centuries the street bore the saint’s name. The doctor who names it today was born in Madrid in 1879. Antonio Piga y Pascual earned his doctorate in 1904 before a panel chaired by none other than Ramón y Cajal, and lived astride two worlds that then barely touched: legal medicine and radiology. His curiosity spilled into the most unusual corners: he showed that microscopic algae, diatoms, could identify a true drowning, since they appear only in the organs of someone who was breathing underwater at death. He even coined a word, “hygiocracy”, to dream of a government ruled by science and health. It is no accident he ended up here. This corner of Embajadores holds the greatest concentration of streets named after doctors in all of old Madrid. When the old General Hospital became obsolete, the city council renamed the streets after eminent doctors, and the saint gave way to the forensic.