Fernando González del Valle Cañizo

Physician and eminent surgeon, he was the initiator of higher surgical education in Cuba.

He was born in La Habana, son of Francisco González del Valle and Dolores del Cañizo.

The González del Valle family is one of the most important in Cuban culture in general and in medical sciences in particular. Among its most outstanding members are: Manuel and José Zacarías, prominent figures of nineteenth-century Cuban philosophy; Esteban, a prestigious physician and professor; and Ambrosio, father of sanitary statistics on the Island.

At the Real Seminario de San Carlos y San Ambrosio de La Habana, Fernando graduated as Bachelor of Arts (1818) and at the Real y Pontificia Universidad de La Habana, as Bachelor (1821), Licentiate (1824), and Doctor of Medicine (1824).

At the Hospital de San Felipe y Santiago de La Habana, he founded in 1821 the first Chair of Medical Surgery in Cuba, which he held without compensation until 1824. That year, and at the proposal of Dr. González del Valle himself, the University's faculty approved the creation of said chair, which he obtained through competitive examinations and took possession of as founding professor on August 5, 1824.

With the university reform of 1842, he was appointed Professor of External Pathology, Operative Medicine, and Surgical Clinic; due to changes in study plans in 1863, he was appointed to External Pathology and Dissection Exercises, and in 1880 to Surgical Pathology.

In 1883 he was authorized to exchange his chair for that of Legal Medicine and Toxicology, and four years later he was assigned the subject of Critical History of Medicine.

On June 20, 1891, he ceased his professorship upon being declared retired, after seven decades of uninterrupted medical teaching, with sixty-seven years at the Universidad de La Habana.

He was also Dean of the Faculty of Medicine (1859-1878), Vice-Rector (1878-1880), and Rector (1880-1890) of the University, Vice-President of the Real Sociedad Patriótica de Amigos del País, and founding member of the Real Academia de Ciencias Médicas, Físicas y Naturales de La Habana and of the Sociedad de Estudios Clínicos de La Habana.

He performed for the first time in Cuba the resection of the upper jaw (1842).

Among his numerous publications, the following stand out: "Apuntes de Cirugía" (1826), "Primera Lección dada a sus alumnos por el Dr. F. G. Del Valle [...]" (1832), "Tablas de Anatomía" (1839), "Programas de las lecciones de Patología Externa" (1865, 1866, and 1869), "Afección cancerosa y su tratamiento (tumor de mama reproducido después de su extirpación)" (1874), and "Cuadro relativo al tratamiento quirúrgico del cáncer" (1875).

He died in La Habana on August 15, 1899.

Source: Cuadernos de Historia de la Salud Pública