Luis García Ballester

The death of Luis Garcia Ballester while still at the height of his powers is a great loss to the world of medical history, not only in Spain. Born in Valencia into a Catalan family, he trained as a doctor, taking his MD in 1966 at Valencia. But already he was turning to a career in medical history, under the influence of J M Lopez Pifiero, with whom he collaborated from 1961 to 1971 during the first years of the Valencia Institute. But it was an encounter with Pedro Lain Entralgo that encouraged him to work on Galen and to produce for his 1968 PhD thesis an annotated translation of Galen's treatise That the souls faculties depend on the body's temperaments. This was the first of a long series of Galenic studies, initially of Galen's psychology, and later of his symptomatology, which also included a short biography of Galen (1972). All were characterized by a feeling for the historical encounter between doctor and patient; the philological tasks of the translator were subordinated to the need to understand Galen as a medical man in Greek and Roman society. With Garcia Ballester's move from a lectureship at Valencia to one at Granada in 1971, where he set up the first Department of the History of Science in Andalucia, his interests developed to encompass the Later Middle Ages and the Renaissance, first with his Historia social de la medicina en la Espania de los siglos XIII al XVI (1976), and then with a memorable series of studies on the Moriscos and their medicine (1976, 1984). These volumes broke the traditional mould of Spanish medical history by concentrating on the social as well as the intellectual forces that influenced medicine. Not only was Garcia Ballester, an admirer of Erwin Ackerknecht, determined to locate 'medicine and society in a mediterranean region' (the subtitle of his 1988 history of medieval medicine in Valencia), but he also showed his enormous sympathy for the oppressed and the down-trodden in provincial Spain. In Franco's Spain this was a political as well as a historical statement. His colleagues and his students knew well how passionately he believed in freedom, of thought and of human society in general, and how willing he was to encourage them to discuss topics with implications far beyond the lecture room. His years in Granada, where he held the chair of medical history from 1976 to 1982, also saw the creation of the journal Dynamis in 1980. The preface to its first number encapsulates his intellectual credo as well as the vigour with which he set about implementing it. In 1975, he supervised the publication of the first volume of a major critical edition of the works of the great Catalan, Arnau de Vilanova (d. 1311), prepared in collaboration with pupils and colleagues within and without Spain. His willingness to help in international academic projects and organizations was untiring. He was involved in the planning of international conferences on Galen from 1982 to 1995, and, from the mid-1980s, organized a fruitful series of joint meetings on medieval and renaissance medicine with the Cambridge Wellcome Unit. His collaboration with the American Michael McVaugh also opened up the riches of the Spanish archives of Valencia and Aragon to wider scrutiny, and helped to bring Spanish medical history out of its isolation. In 1982 Garcia Ballester left Granada for Santander, where his wife held a post as a marine biologist, moving on in 1987 to Barcelona as a research professor in the CSIC Institucion Mila i Fontanals. In both places he had to build up a group almost from scratch. In Barcelona in particular, he could conduct and organize further research into late medieval Spain, with its varied communities and languages. He encouraged studies on medieval Jewish medicine