useless-catalanfacts: The pioneer doctor in the fight against pandemics who was sentenced to death i

useless-catalanfacts:The pioneer doctor in the fight against pandemics who was sentenced to death in 1941.Joan Baptista Peset Aleixandre (1881-1941) was a Valencian doctor. He licensed in chemestry and mecanics and got PhDs in Medicine, Chemestry, and Law, and later continued to study forensic medicine and toxicology with the moment’s greatest experts in France.He worked in the 1912 typhus epidemy in Seville (Andalusia, Spain) and the next year exposed his experience in the Congress of Medicine in the Catalan Language. In 1916, he went back to València and was assigned the responsibility to create the Provincial Institute of Hygiene, where he payed for the building with his own money. In the Institute, he discovered a treatment against purulent meningitis which proved to have absolutly effective, started a campaign against typhus, discovered a vaccine against the pulmonar problems caused by the Spanish flu, and when there was a big epidemy in Cheste and Torrent he immediately went there to take blood samples and treat pacients and discovered the origin of the illness in the contaminated water.His works in detection, contention and analysis of people infected by a virus or bacteria were very important in the moment, and his articles on how to treat pandemics are still being followed nowadays with the COVID-19 pandemic.He was elected important positions (such as president of the University of Valencia and director of the medical magazine Crónica Médica) and collaborated with the Valencian Medical Institute, among other things, and became a very respected doctor both by professionals who admired his work and by the lay people of Valencia who were impressed also by his good character.But he also had time for other important things like politics. He was always a leftist and republican, he even was president of the Valencian section of the leftist party Izquierda Republicana. In 1936, he was the candidate for Valencia in the Front Popular (the coalition of leftists parties) and won by a landslide.The democratic victory of the Popular Front was not accepted by the right-wingers (whose coalition had been defeated in the elections) and the army soon started a coup d’état with the intention of imposing a fascist dictatorship that led to the Spanish Civil War.During the war, Peset Aleixandre was in charge of supervising war hospitals and, as well as continuing his work as a politician, he studied the psychological repercussion of war on inviduals.In 1939, when the fascists were clearly about to win the war, he left the country like thousands of refugeesand crossed the border with France to go on exile. But when he reached Tolouse, he decided that he had to go back.In Spain, he helped the president of the republic escape, and back in his homeland Valencia he was reunited with his sons, who had fought in the antifascist side of the war. The family tried to escape through the only possible option still open, which was the harbour of Alacant (a city in the south of the Valencian Country), but the ships that were supposed to come and take the thousands of people who wanted to leave never came and all of them were taken prisoners by the fascists.Peset was taken to a detention camp and later moved to the Albatera concentration camp, where he helped the other prisoners by working as a nurse. He was moved to different prisons until he ended in the Model prison of València, where he gave classes to his fellow prisoners and tried to make their hygienic conditions better.Like the other republican professors, Peset was barred from working again as a university professor for being against the fascist dictatorship. He was also judged for “aiding in rebellion” and sentenced to death. Many people begged the authorities to revoke his death sentence, even the archbishop of València begged to the dictator Franco himself. However, they refused and Peset was executed in Paterna in May 24th, 1941.Until his last moment, he always tried to help. In the morning of his execution, he had operated a prisoner who had an hernia.He was one of the 150,000 people killed by the Francoist regime between 1936 and 1943. -- source link

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