Calle Doctor Velasco

For years this street was called Calle del Parque, and so it appeared on the first day of 1898. On 11 March 1904 it changed its name to honor Pedro González de Velasco, dead twenty-two years earlier. The tribute came late, when he could no longer receive it in person. Velasco had been born in Valseca, a village in Segovia, in 1815. He reached Madrid an orphan, studied surgery at the Royal College of San Carlos and ended up as professor of operations at the Faculty of Medicine. He performed more than eight thousand dissections in his lifetime. In 1865 he founded the Anthropological Society of Madrid and commissioned Francisco de Cubas to build a home for his collections, at number 68 of calle Alfonso XII; that building, now the National Museum of Anthropology, was at once his home and his school. The end of his story is the part that stays in the memory. His embalmed body remained in the museum until 1943, when it was moved to the San Isidro cemetery; in 1965 it finally passed to the family niche. The doctor who spent his life opening corpses ended up preserved inside his own, among the pieces he had gathered himself.