Calle Pérez Herrera

Cristóbal Pérez de Herrera was born in Salamanca in 1558 and served twelve years as chief physician of the royal galleys before becoming the king’s chamber physician. But his name is remembered less for medicine than for a social proposal. In his Discursos del amparo de los legítimos pobres (1598) he proposed distinguishing the genuine beggar from the false one and building shelters and hospitals to bring order to poverty in Madrid. From that effort came hospital projects. He died in Madrid in 1620, poor and without the crown ever recognizing his service. The calle de Pérez Herrera in Ciudad Jardín shares its neighborhood with other streets devoted to humanists and physicians of the past, within the colonies laid out in Chamartín at the start of the twentieth century.