Gregorio Marañón y Posadillo,ñó OWL (; 19 May 1887 – 27 March 1960) was a Spanish physician, scientist, historian, writer and philosopher. He married Dolores Moya in 1911, and they had four children (Carmen, Belén, María Isabel and Gregorio).
Life and work
An austere, humanist and liberal man, he is considered one of the most brilliant Spanish intellectuals of the 20th century. Besides his erudition, he also stands out for his elegant literary style. As many other thinkers of his time, he involved himself socially and politically: he was a Republican and fought the Miguel Primo de Rivera dictatorship (he was condemned to jail for a month) and showed his disagreement with Spanish communism. Moreover, he supported the Second Spanish Republic in its beginnings, but later criticised it because of its lack of cohesion among the Spanish people.
Probably after going away from Madrid (around January 1937), and when asked his opinion of republican Spain, Marañón spoke in a meeting of French intellectuals as follows: "You don't need to try very hard, my friends; listen to this: eighty-eight percent of teachers from Madrid, Valencia and Barcelona (the three universities which, alongside Murcia's, had stayed on the republican side) have been forced to exile abroad. And do you know why? Simply because they were afraid of being murdered by the reds (communists in Spain), despite many of the threatened intellectuals were thought of as left-wing men."
In the article "Liberalism and Communism", published in Revue de Paris on 15 December 1937, he clearly expressed his change of opinion towards the Second Republic:
From December 1936 to autumn of 1942, Marañón lived abroad, in a de facto exile. Back in Spain again, the dictatorship (as it did with other intellectuals) used his figure to improve its exterior image. In overall terms, the Francoist state respected him. Miguel Artola, in 1987, stated that the biggest political contribution of Marañón was clearly having raised the flag of freedom, in a time where no one or only a few could do it, understanding liberalism as the opposite to a specific political position. In this sense, he would state:
His experience as a kind of insider served his knowledge about the Spanish state. After the students riot of 1956, he led, along with Menéndez Pidal, protests denouncing the dire political situation under Francoist rule, asking for the return of those exiled.
His early contribution to Medicine was focused on endocrinology, in fact him being one of its forefathers. During his first year of graduate school (1909) he published seven works in the Clinical Magazine of Madrid, of which only one was related to endocrinology, about the autoimmune polyendocrine syndrome. In 1910, he published five works, two of them related to endocrinology, about the Addison disease. In following years, his attraction to endocrinology only grew larger. In 1930 he published Endocrinology (printed in Madrid by Espasa-Calpe) and thirty more works in scientific journals on that speciality, of which half were works as the only author, which is remarkable taking into account the political-historical context in which Marañón was directly or indirectly involved. He wrote the first treatise of internal medicine in Spain, along with Doctor Hernando, and his book Manual of Etiologic Diagnostic (1946) was one of the most widespread medicine books in the world, because of its new focus on the study of diseases and its copious and unprecedented clinical contributions.
Beyond his intense dedication to medicine, he wrote about other topics, such as history, art, travels, cooking, clothing, hairstyle, or shoes. In his works he analysed, creating the unique and unprecedented genre of "biological essays", the great human passions through historical characters, and their psychic and physiopathologic features: shyness in his book Amiel, resentment in Tiberio, power in The Count-Duke of Olivares, intrigue and treason in politics in Antonio Pérez (one of the makers of the Spanish "black legend"), the "donjuanism" in Don Juan, etc. He was inducted and collaborated in five of the eight Spanish Real Academies.