I recently received a book from Chile. This book is in French and is titled “Traité D’Accouchements” (Treatise of Childbirth) or a “Treatise in Obstetrics” and was published in 1898 in Paris. The author is Dr. Pierre-Victor Alfred Auvard, (1855 - 1940), a French Obstetrician and Gynecologist.
The book belonged to the library of San José Hospital. The Old San José Hospital is a former hospital located on San José Street, next to the General Cemetery of Santiago, in the Independencia district of Santiago, Chile. Built between 1841 and 1872, it functioned as a hospital until 1999, when the new San José Hospital was built. Parts of this hospital are now being demolished and a new one will be built in its place, but the old books from the library were discarded without a second thought. An engineer in charge of the new construction managed to rescue some of these books, and one of them was brought from Chile to the United States by another friend of mine, Carlos Verdugo, a classmate.
The book was in terrible condition, with a barely legible title, the spine was broken, and the signatures (groups of pages that together from the text block) separated as the threads that kept the book together were torn. Bookbinding and book repair being another one of my hobbies, I undertook the task and now it will be added to my collection. Here are some pictures of the process. Click on the image to see a larger version.
In one of its pages, the book has an old and barely legible stamp the reads “Manuel Casanueva del C.” A short search indicated that this was the Ex-Libris stamp of a Chilean surgeon Dr. Manuel Casanueva del Canto. Of course, I had to do some research on the past owner of this book.
Manuel Casanueva del Canto was born in the city of Linares, Chile on July 5, 1908. From 1925 to 1931 he coursed 1st to 6th year of medical school at the Medical College of the University of Chile (where I studied). At that time the College of Medicine was in the Independencia neighborhood in the city of Santiago. In 1930 he obtained his medical license.
The repaired book in my library
Between 1930 and 1931 he was a surgical resident at the Hospital San Francisco de Borja (where I was a patient as a child), passing through Internal Medicine, Emergency Medicine and Surgery, and Obstetrics, obtaining his surgical degree in May 1932. His thesis for the degree was entitled “Pathological Anatomy: Inflammatory alterations of the gallbladder”.
As a surgeon, he worked at the Santiago Military Hospital, Central Emergency Services, and the Central Trauma Hospital. In 1952, going back to his roots, he moved to the Surgical Department of the University of Chile at the Hospital “Jose Joaquin Aguirre”. This hospital is on the same campus as the Medical College where he studied.
In 1955 he applied for (and obtained) the position of Professor Extraordinaire of Pathological Surgery in the Medical College of the University of Chile. At this time, he already had a great teaching career, several medical awards, authored the book “Practical Blood Transfusion” in 1939 as well as co-authored several medical books and over 81 papers.
He became Chief of Surgery at the Jose Joaquin Aguirre Hospital and in 1961 he invited Pablo Neruda, Chilean Nobel Prize winner in literature, to lecture at the hospital.
In 1975 Editorial Andres Bello published his book “Surgery”, two volumes in Spanish. I have not been able to trace this book. Not much is known of him after this date. No photography or portrait has been found.
He married Maria Yolanda Carrasco Coral (date unknown), they had three children: Maria Cristina, Isabel, and Manuel Luis.
He died on February 13, 1981, in the city of Viña del Mar, and is buried in Santiago, Chile. Further research indicated that this book I received as a gift was donated to the library of Hospital San José by Dr. Casanueva where it eventually was discarded, rescued, transported to the US, and repaired.
Final cover made with leather and linen book cloth
Marbled endpapers
I hope this article reaches the Casanueva del Canto family in Linares (today they probably are Casanueva Carrasco and/or Casanueva Iommi) and they can help me update this research, and hopefully a photograph of Dr. Casanueva del Canto. To this end, here is the Spanish version of this article.