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On Monday, September 28, the jury met to award the 51st Uriach Foundation Prize “History of Medicine,” which is presented annually by the Uriach Foundation 1838.

The meeting took place at the Círculo Ecuestre in Barcelona and was attended by the jury members: Ms. Ana Maria Carmona Cornet, Mr. Alfons Zarzoso, and Mr. Jon Arrizabalaga Valbuena, who served as secretary.

Representing the Uriach Foundation 1838 was its vice president, Mr. Javier Uriach Torelló.

After successive rounds of voting, the 51st Uriach Foundation Prize was awarded to the work “Psychoanalytic Treatments for Homosexuals in Chile (1952–1957),” whose author, once the sealed envelope was opened, turned out to be Mr. Marcelo Enríque Valenzuela Cáceres, residing in Talca, Chile.

The runner-up prize was awarded to the work “Surgical Innovation, Private Clinics and Public Charity: Towards a New Model of Care in the City of Valencia,” whose author, once the sealed envelope was opened, was revealed to be Mr. Xavier García Ferrandis, residing in Valencia.

With the publication of the jury’s decision, the call for submissions for the 52nd Uriach Foundation Prize “History of Medicine” is now open. The contest rules will be published shortly on the Foundation’s website.

Next Tuesday, September 22, the Uriach Chair of Nutraceuticals will be presented at the Rectorate of Rovira i Virgili University in Tarragona. Attending the presentation will be the Rector of the University, Dr. Maria José Figueras; the Vice-Rector for Innovation and Knowledge Transfer, Dr. Francisco Medina; Professor in the Department of Biochemistry and Biotechnology and Director of the Chair, Dr. Begoña Muguerza; Uriach’s Consumer Healthcare Director, Dr. Javier Navarro; and Uriach’s Consumer Healthcare R&D Manager, Ms. Rosa Raventós.

This Chair is the result of a collaboration agreement between the Uriach Foundation and Rovira i Virgili University to promote knowledge of nutraceuticals in the educational, professional, and social spheres through the dissemination, teaching, and research activities that foster the progress and development of this discipline in our country. The Chair will be attached to the Department of Biochemistry and Biotechnology, which coordinates the official Master’s in Nutrition and Metabolism (URV-UB), offered in collaboration with the University of Barcelona. Its director will be Dr. Begoña Muguerza, Associate Professor in this department and head of the Nutrigenomics Research Group at URV.

The objectives of the Chair will be to contribute to the training of students so that they can face new challenges in the field of nutraceuticals, facilitate their entry into the business and industrial sectors, promote the training of healthcare professionals in this discipline, foster scientific meetings to disseminate nutraceuticals, and create new lines of research in this innovative field of study.

The generation and dissemination of knowledge on nutraceuticals, from different but complementary perspectives industrial, professional, and educational, will support the creation of future spaces for debate, collaboration, and development in this field.

To achieve this, the Chair will organize various activities such as courses and specialized workshops for professionals and students, the awarding of scholarships to students of the official Master’s in Nutrition and Metabolism (URV-UB), and the establishment of an annual prize for the best Master’s Thesis related to nutraceuticals. In addition, Uriach professionals will participate as lecturers in this master’s program to provide an industrial and professional perspective on nutraceuticals.

Advertising postcard from the late 19th century for ENOSÓTERO, a product designed to preserve and improve all types of wines. Easy to use and economical, it was intended for winemakers and wine merchants who wanted to prevent wine from turning into vinegar.

As indicated on the back of the postcard: “At a dose of about 45 grams per hectoliter (an ounce and a half per batch), it preserves and improves all kinds of wines, both natural and those to which sugar or molasses have been added. It is indispensable to prevent low-alcohol wines and so-called agua-pié wines from turning into vinegar or rotting. With Enosótero, wine can travel by sea and withstand changes in temperature without alteration.”

This product was exclusively distributed by the company “Alomar y Uriach”, headquartered at 20 Montcada Street, Barcelona.

In these difficult days, in which the Covid-19 pandemic has changed our lives and half the world is searching for a vaccine to confront this disease, we would like to recall how the immunization system was first introduced in Spain.

The person responsible for this great advance was the physician Francisco Piguillem Verdacer who, following Edward Jenner’s experiments, inoculated four children from Puigcerdà in December 1800 with lymph brought from Paris, so that they would develop immunity to the virus, thus paving the way for the vaccine.

The document that best records these events is Piguillem’s work “La vacuna en España ó cartas familiares sobre esta nueva inoculación: escritas a la señora.” This work, published in 1814, brings together the letters that the author wrote to the mother of one of these first vaccinated children, in which he describes the events, the procedure, and a brief history of smallpox and the vaccination introduced by Edward Jenner.

Despite criticism and reproaches from some detractors of this new practice, Piguillem continued to spread vaccination throughout Catalonia and the rest of the country, translated François Colon’s “Essai sur l’innoculation de la vaccine”, and was appointed Professor of Medicine at the Medical-Practical Academy of Barcelona.

In addition to a copy of the aforementioned work, the Uriach Foundation also preserves a set of manuscripts dated 1826 containing lecture notes by Piguillem on Pyretology, Medical Philosophy, Ideology, and Classification of Medicines, recorded by his students.

Advertisement from 1956 for “Allcock’s Plasters”, a product registered with the General Directorate of Health on March 23, 1933, and indicated for relieving rheumatism, sciatica, or lumbago through the effect of some of its ingredients, such as fine incense, Burgundy resin, beeswax, myrrh gum, palo santo gum, among others.

This product, originally from the American company Allcock, based in Ossining (New York), was manufactured in our facilities in the Clot neighborhood, thanks to the pharmacist José María Uriach Balari, and was distributed exclusively in Spain by Uriach Laboratories.

The retail price of this healing plaster was 6.40 pesetas.

The Uriach Foundation Library has recently acquired an important collection of pamphlets on cholera, expanding our holdings on this subject:

• Arandia, Aniceto María de. El cólera, nociones generales para conocerlo en sus diferentes períodos, medios de evitar su invasión, el contagio y método curativo. 28 p. Vitoria, 1885.

• Cartilla popular contra el cólera, instrucciones preventivas, pronóstico, tratamiento, preservación individual, primeros cuidados, formulario de desinfección. 30 p.

• Gimeno, Amalio. El cólera según el doctor Koch. 100 p. Valencia, 1884.

• Guallart, Toribio. Instrucción para el pueblo… cólera-morbo asiático. 30 p. Madrid, 1854.

• Hayem, Jorge. Tratamiento del Cólera Morbo, lección dada en la Facultad de Medicina de Paris. 15 p. Madrid, 1884.

• López Ferreira, Francisco. Profilaxis del cólera indiano: antisepsia intestinal en el ataque colérico. 4 p. Madrid, 1892.

• Necoechea, Félix. Receta para curar el cólera. 6 p. Puebla (Mexico), 1850.

• Brevísima instrucción que para preservarse y corregir los primeros síntomas del cólera morbo dirige la Academia de Medicina de Castilla la Vieja a los habitantes de la provincia. 12 p. Valladolid, 1865.

• Rosso, Laureano. El cólera, consideraciones sobre los puntos más interesantes de esta enfermedad y exposición de su tratamiento sintomático y de las precauciones generales… 27 p. Seville, 1885.

• Seoane, Mateo. Documentos relativos a la enfermedad llamada cólera espasmódica de la India. 48 p. Madrid, 1831.

• Sociedad Española de Higiene. Conclusiones relativas a la profilaxis y los medios de atenuar los efectos del cólera morbo epidémico. 24 p. Madrid, 1890.

• Tunisi, Carlos. Tratamiento específico del cólera. 2nd ed., notably revised. 32 p. Barcelona, 1884.

• Valera y Giménez. Breve reseña de una pequeña epidemia de Cólera morbo asiático en Villalgordo del Júcar. 167 p. Albacete, 1885.

The Uriach Foundation 1838 invites you on February 13 at 7:30 p.m. to a round table entitled “History Has a Remedy. Medicines and Pharmacists of Catalonia.”

This event is organized by the Uriach Foundation, in collaboration with the magazine Sàpiens and El Mundo de Ayer, and will be presented by Mr. Toni Soler, the popular host of the TV3 programs Polònia and Està Passant. Other participants in the round table will be Mr. Albert Figueras, Director of the Fundació Institut Català de Farmacologia, and Mr. Joaquín Uriach, President of the Uriach Group and trustee of our Foundation.

The event will take place in the Pau Gil Hall of the Sant Pau Modernist Complex, one of the key works of architect Lluís Domènech i Montaner and one of the most emblematic landmarks of the city of Barcelona.

A unique opportunity to learn more about our history in an incomparable setting.

The Uriach Foundation 1838 has recently acquired an issue of the newspaper La Ilustración Artística published on February 8, 1909.

This magazine was published weekly in Barcelona between 1882 and 1916 by the publishing house Montaner y Simón. At first, it gave priority to engravings over photography, but by the late 19th century, photography began to prevail on its pages.

In this issue, there is an advertisement for “Fenol Comeleran”, a product described in the ad as antiepidemic, antihemorrhagic, antiputrid, cauterizing, and insecticidal, indicated against cholera, yellow fever, typhus, smallpox, etc.

The product was exclusively distributed in Spain by J. Uriach y Cía. from its headquarters located at 20 Montcada Street, Barcelona.

In its commitment to promoting studies on the history of the Health Sciences, the Uriach Foundation 1838 has established an annual international prize, which will be awarded to the best work that, in the judgment of a jury designated for this purpose, addresses a topic related to History and the Health Sciences.

The award will be granted under the following

RULES

1. The 51st Uriach Foundation Prize “History of Medicine” for 2020 carries an award of €3,000 for the winner and a runner-up prize of €1,000, if the jury deems it appropriate.

2. The monographs submitted for the Prize must be original and unpublished. Works that, at the time of the award, have been published in whole or in part, as well as those submitted to other competitions, will not be accepted.

3. Entries must be submitted in electronic format together with a printed copy, double-spaced, with a recommended length of 80,000 characters including spaces. Bibliography or documentary references, as well as supplementary iconography, must also be included.

4. The works, written in Spanish, must be sent to the Uriach Foundation. The deadline for submission is July 1, 2020. Submissions must follow the system of motto and sealed envelope, without the name(s) of the author(s) appearing on the work itself. The author(s) identification must be included inside a sealed envelope marked with the same motto as the original work.

5. The 51st Uriach Foundation Prize “History of Medicine” will be awarded by a Jury, whose decision will be announced during November 2020.

6. Once the Prize has been awarded, the secretary of the Jury will proceed to open the sealed envelope of the winning entry and, if applicable, that of the runner-up.

7. Should the Jury deem it appropriate, the winning work, as well as other submitted works, may be published in the digital journal Pharmacy, Medicine and History, always in agreement with the authors.

8. The award-winning monographs will become the property of the Uriach Foundation 1838, which will hold the right of publication for three years following the award. If publication does not take place within this period, the publication rights will revert to the author, who may publish the work elsewhere, with the obligation to cite the Prize received. Works that are not awarded or selected for publication will be destroyed without the opening of their sealed envelopes.

9. Participation in this competition implies full acceptance of the rules of this call.

Palau-solità i Plegamans, December 2019

Correspondence related to this Call should be addressed to:

Uriach Foundation 1838
Pol. Industrial Riera de Caldes
Av. Camí Reial, 51–57
08184 Palau-solità i Plegamans (Barcelona)
fu1838@uriach.com – (+34) 93 863 02 25

The Uriach Foundation 1838 has recently acquired a collection of advertising postcards from the 1920s for the product Fidibus Zampironi Insect Repellent. These mosquito-killer tablets were produced by the laboratory Farmacia Internazionale Zampironi, headquartered in the Italian city of Venice.

On the front of the postcard one can see St. Mark’s Square and Basilica, while on the reverse side the text reads: “Do you want to sleep well? Burn one tablet at bedtime of the genuine Fidibus Zampironi insect repellent. Kills disease-carrying mosquitoes.”

The distribution of Zampironi’s Italian products was handled exclusively by Uriach Laboratories during the 1920s and 1930s.