It is not unusual for the traces of many admirable women to be erased by the will of the family: that is the case of Dolors Aleu i Riera, the first practicing doctor in Spain. Her husband burned any trace of her work after her death in 1913.
And what an exhaustive job his was. She was born in Barcelona in 1857 into a bourgeois family, and thanks to the support of her father, she enrolled in Medicine. The young women then faced explicit opposition from their peers and teachers, who often forced them to go to class with an escort.
Despite his excellent grades (five extraordinary prizes and innumerable outstanding ones), the Ministry of Education denied him the opportunity to take the surgeon exams. The year was 1879, and several students suffered from the same situation: women found themselves with innumerable bureaucratic barriers. Dolors resisted, complained and was the only one who managed to pass the exams. She earned her doctorate with a passionate thesis on the health and education situation of women, in which she analyzed in detail the oppression of the rich and the misery of peasant women, and she established her own practice in Barcelona
There she attended to women of all social classes: from prostitutes to ladies of high society who did not dare to be seen by a male doctor, children of the Inclusa and solemnly poor. Already married and a mother, she continued attending the practice for more than twenty years, although the death of her eldest son, Camil, a doctor like her, after contracting tuberculosis, plunged her into a deep depression that made her abandon the profession. She died two years later, and her burial was a veritable display of public grief. What is known about her has been traced through the official documents of the University of Barcelona, and a handful of surviving letters.
Espido Freire
