SOME BIOGRAPHIC TRAITS FROM GREGORIO MARAÑÓN

Travel to Las Hurdes
with king Alfonso XII

Marañón was in the 1920's and 1930's a prolific author of medical books and scienfic papers in which he applied the mastery he had acquired of internal secretions, endocrinology and thyroid diseases to a wide range of pathological themes.

In between 1920 and 1943 he published 17 medical books. Among them the:

  • "Bocio and Cretinismo"
  • "Prädiabetische Zustande"
  • "Intersexual States in Humans"
  • "Sexual Physiopathology"
  • "Addison's  Disease"
  • "Textbook of Thyroid's Diseases"
  • "Texbook  of Endocrinology"
  • "Endocrine Gynecology"
  • "Texbook of Internal Medicine" (in colaboration with Prof. T. Hernando)
  • "The Critical Age"
  • "Texbook of the Etiological Diagnosis"

Right from the beginning of his career, patients flocked to him fron all over Spain for his "clinical eye" and his reassuring manner rapidly became something of a national legend. He conceived medicine as the global study of the individual in a strict anthropological sense with special attention to the individual's clinical history and he undestood hormones to be the mould and framework of the individual's biology, not as mere chapter of pathology. His personal conception of the endocrine study of the human being leads to a personal ecuation of the patient to which diseases should adjust. A representative study of this conception was his neurohumoral theory of emotions, an early step in the way to Neuroendocrinology.


With Ortega y Gasset
in Paris, 1939

Blessed with an insatiable intellectual curiosity and an unlimited capacity for concentrated study, Marañón wrote extensively both on the social issues of his day and on history, a discipline that was arguably his greatest passion after medicine. He was the author of seminar studies on historical figures that can be classed as wholly innovative psycho-biographies because he researched his subjets from the standpoint of his own scientific learning and interests. The first or these was "Henry IV of Castille (1930), a study on impotence. Then came "Amiel (1932), a study on timidity, "Tiberius" (1939), a study on resentment, and two works in particular, "Antonio Pérez" a biography of Philip II's secretary and "The count-duke of Olivares", a biography of Philips IV's strongman, made a major contribution to the historiography of 16th and 17th century Spain.

The breadth of Marañón's scholarship received due recognition with his election over the years to a further four of Spain's Royal Academies; the academies of Language, History, Fine Arts and Sciences. Distinctions outside Spain included Honorary Doctorates from several universities including Paris's Sorbonne.