Moisès Broggi i Vallès (1908–2012): Military surgeon and Catalan humanitarian

Abstract

Catalan surgeon Moisès Broggi entered medical practice in 1931 as Spain was modernizing rapidly. Five years later, however, an attempted military coup sparked a nationwide civil war. Broggi offered his services to the embattled Republic and joined the Medical Service of the International Brigades. He served alongside colleagues from many countries, helping to develop advances in military medicine and especially trauma surgery. Broggi chose to remain working in Barcelona as Franco's Nationalist forces entered the city, in spite of the risk of reprisal he faced as a former officer of the International Brigades. Although forced from his leading position in the public health service, he developed a distinguished private practice. In the year of Franco's death he became President of Barcelona's Royal Academy of Medicine and he received many other honours. Just months before his death at the remarkable age of 104, Dr Moisès Broggi continued to discuss and write about the concerns that had directed the course of his life -advances in medical science and the intellectual and political repression that had hindered delivery of those advances. In an article titled Exile and Silence he noted the groundbreaking work carried out under the auspices of the prestigious scientific institutions founded during Spain's Second Republic and the subsequent dark decades of exile suffered by many of their prominent scientists, some of them his close friends.

Transfusion in the Spanish Civil War: Supply and demand, the role of the “blood transfusion officer” and British planning for the outbreak of the Second World War

“…The auto-chir involved two vehicles, one for the surgical team and one carrying all the equipment needed to set up an advanced surgical unit (No.1 Hospital, Fig. 2) [40,41].…”

“…The FTU concept of a transfusion officer, orderlies and a driver, represents a more formal and structured version of Saxton's mobile laboratory and transfusion team, and the mobile surgical units deployed in North Africa [83](Fig. 6) resemble the concept of the auto-chir successfully applied in Spain [40,41]. To what extent these features would have been chosen independently and to what extent they were influenced by knowledge based on the Civil War experience itself remains debatable, but the necessary information was available, those in the decision-making process for the development of Army transfusion policy and procedures clearly had access to knowledge of the Spanish experience: the outcome is suggestive, and the inference is clear.…”

Reginald Saxton: An unlikely pioneer of battleground blood transfusion

“…In the early summer of 1937, Republican surgeons, particularly Moises Broggi, pressed successfully for the development of mobile teams with capacity to set up, equip and supply surgical operating units, a revival of the WW1 French concept of the 'autochir' (derived from 'automobile' and 'chirurgerie'), to facilitate movement of field medical/surgical operations in response to movement of battlefronts and in time these became widely deployed. 24 The next battle where Saxton was actively involved was at Teruel in north-eastern Spain in the winter of 1937-1938. In the interval between Brunete and Teruel, Saxton was engaged in running a small hospital and managing an outbreak of typhoid.…”