McVaugh, Michael R.

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DYNAMIS. Acta Hisp. Med. Sci. Hist. Illus. 2002, 22, 473-476.Luis García Ballester: Personal recollectionsMICHAEL R. McVAUGH (*)BIBLID [0211-9536(2002) 22; 473-476]Twenty-five years ago —23 July 1977; I noted it in my diary— Istepped down off the TER in Granada and met Luis García Ballester forthe first time. We had been corresponding since 1970, and well beforethe first volume of the Arnaldi de Villanova Opera Medica Omnia appearedin 1975 we were «Dear Luis» and «Querido Michael» in correspondence,yet we had never seen or talked to each other in person. I had onlytwenty-four hours in Granada before going on to Barcelona, but noneof them were wasted. Luis drove me roundabout through Granada tothe house (just below Manuel de Falla’s) that he had bought andrepaired; Samay and Susana greeted me there, and we talked and talkedby their pool, drinking lemonade from their own trees; we went to theFaculty of Medicine, and talked and talked some more; we finally toreourselves away, returned home, and ate almejas and camarones and cigalaswith a Galician wine; and then we all drove out to San Nicolás andwatched the lights of Granada spread out before us until the Alhambrawas darkened at midnight.It may seem odd to begin an appreciation of Luis with personalreminiscences, but in fact for me, as I think back on our long friendship,it is impossible to separate the personality from the scholar —or fromthe scholarship. I visited him again in Granada in 1981, as I was beginninga year’s stay in Barcelona to read systematically through the registers of(*) Wells Professor of History. Department of History. Hamilton Hall CB # 3195. TheUniversity of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Chapel Hill, NC 27599-3195, EE.UU.E-mail: mcvaugh@email.unc.edu474 IN MEMORIAMDYNAMIS. Acta Hisp. Med. Sci. Hist. Illus. 2002, 22, 473-476.the Archivo de la Corona de Aragón, in an attempt to understand fromprimary documentation the character of early fourteenth-century medi-cine there; again Luis welcomed me warmly, and characteristically sharedwith me his rich bibliographical command of the historical literature ofmedicine in medieval Catalunya. Characteristically, too, when after thatyear I resolved to expand my search from Barcelonan archives to othersin the Crown of Aragon, Luis used his personal contacts to make thatpossible for me —arranging for me to live in his own Colegio Luis Vivesin the summer of 1983, while I worked in the archives of his belovedValencia; again arranging a place for me to live in Zaragoza in the summerof 1986, and providing me an entrée into the university world there.But by this time the project was as much his as mine —it was hardto remember a time when we had not been talking about it together,and we began to plan a social history of Catalan medicine for the wholeof the fourteenth. Over the next five years we worked our way througha dozen archival collections, «hoja a hoja», as we used to tell ourselvesproudly, each archive more exciting than the next: after Zaragoza,Lleida and Cervera in 1986, Girona in 1987, Manresa, Tortosa, and Vicin 1989. In the process, he introduced me to Catalunya, giving me asense of locality. My recollections from those years, like my memory ofGranada, associate him with particular contexts and events: my introductionto cecina, shaved from a leg in a dark butcher’s shop in Morella; ourstartled discovery of a leaden bullet still embedded in a Leridan register,making the Civil War suddenly real to me; our daily voyages to Gironafrom l’Escala, where a friend had loaned him a house, and which nowcomes back to me every time I see an anchovy.And places mattered to Luis. One summer he himself spent poringover the archives in Puigcerdà, commuting from the house he and hisfamily had rented in Llívia, and he was deeply intrigued by the fact thathe was returning every evening to a bit of Spain completely surroundedby France. Again, he was quietly delighted that the apartment he boughtin carrer Notariat while he was Profesor de Investigación at the Consejowas not only conveniently across from the notarial archive, but was alsoactually in the same building where Ramón y Cajal had lived in Barce-lona. Perhaps therefore it is right that I remember so vividly the physicalsetting in which we first met and the places where we worked.475Luis García Ballester (1936-2000)DYNAMIS. Acta Hisp. Med. Sci. Hist. Illus. 2002, 22, 473-476.It may be that Luis’s feeling for the particularity of place was a facetof one of the things that characterized him as a historian, his fascinationwith concrete detail and its meaning. It was a fascination that I felt, too,and on our travels home from archives we talked about the documentarydiscoveries of the day, not about discourse and deconstruction. Somedays, of course, there would be nothing, eight hours spent going throughnotarial manuals with not so much as a barberius turning up in therecord; other days we would exult in a series of unexpected testimonies.It was not the facts in themselves that intrigued him so much as whatthey might suggest for the larger fourteenth century that was emerging;his sense of significance was such that often his judgement would belater confirmed by a document that surfaced another day in anotherarchive. It was in this way, as he and I were at work with Agustín RubioVela, preparing a study on medical licensing in Valencia, that Luis wasable to consider isolated licenses from the 1370s and 1380s and recognizetheir probable evolution out of the circumstances peculiar to the kingdomand the city in the first half of the fourteenth century.Luis’s personality and his scholarship fused together in anotherimportant way as well. His transparent sincerity and his enthusiasmcould charm the most cautious archivist out of his reserve, and regularlygave us access to materials that might otherwise have been difficult orimpossible to consult. Local archives operated somewhat more informallyin the 1980s than they do today, of course, but, even so, Luis’s candourregularly won us unusual favors. In one archive we were given the runof a vast storeroom to look for missing documentation; in another, wewere given the key to work in the evening, told only to lock up when weleft; in a third, we were given a document to study which anotherresearcher, three months later, was assured could not possibly exist.Virtually anyone who met Luis and talked to him about his work recognizedhis overriding dedication to the integrity of scholarship, transcendingnational or local or institutional loyalties, and knew that he could betrusted absolutely.Luis’s interests were so broad and his energies so great that he didnot of course limit himself to the Crown of Aragon, or indeed to thehistory of medicine. His work on the far more poorly documentedhistory of science and medicine in Castile and Leon, which was an476 IN MEMORIAMDYNAMIS. Acta Hisp. Med. Sci. Hist. Illus. 2002, 22, 473-476.important theme in the last fifteen years of his life, showed these sametraits, and here, where the evidence is so scanty, they were even morecritical: I am thinking particularly of his analysis of notes on a single leafin a Vatican manuscript, which allowed him to draw astonishing conclusionsabout the presence of scientific interests among the mendicant communitiesof Santiago de Compostela already in the 1220s, to situate this peninsu-lar interest within wider European intellectual developments, and toraise important questions about what happened subsequently to natu-ral-scientific study in Castile.These researches, combined with the incessant labor Luis expendedon AVOMO, which alone made possible the series’ survival and success,meant that the social history of later fourteenth-century Catalan medi-cine was temporarily set aside —none of us guessing that «temporarily»would become forever. Luis’s meticulous notes, in that familiar regularhandwriting —from the registers of Joan I and Martí I, from Mallorca,from Puigcerdà, and elsewhere— may someday be used, I suppose, butnot as he himself could have exploited them. Somewhere in his papersis the material for a paper he once excitedly sketched out to me,concerning Nadal Lambri, master of medicine in the medical faculty atLleida in the 1390s, and his participation in the inquest into the mysteriousdeath of a countess —or so I seem to remember; somewhere are hisnotes on dozens of apothecary inventories from all over Catalunya,which he transcribed whenever he came upon them. These are just twoof the many fertile subjects for study that he was incessantly tossing off.Inexhaustible in his investigations, forever passing on brilliant andexciting insights —even in the papers he never got to write, Luis remainsa model and an inspiration for us all.

Luis García Ballester : personal recollections

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