Ilustrados españoles y la ciencia europea: Pedro María González Gutiérrez y su Tratado de las enfermedades de la gente del mar

Abstract

In this paper we try to follow the marks that Pedro María
González Gutiérrez in his main work, Tratado de las enfermedades de la gente de mar (1805), leaves on his apprenticeship in the College of Surgery of Cadiz and his membership in the Royal Navy as a surgeon. This allows us
to perceive the idiosyncrasy of the new type of scientist who appeared in Spain in the eighteenth century, who has not been trained in universities or in traditional religious centres, colleges or monasteries, but in the new institutions that the monarchs created to cultivate science at their direct service. In this way they bring Spanish science closer to European science, a fact that shows us that the institutionalisation of a science is a necessary condition for it to be firmly established in a Society. We underline the dependence of González Gutiérrez's works on their professional and institutional environament, now when the Spanish public authorities seem to believe that investment in maintaining scientific institutions is a waste of money that is not profitable or that science is nourished by isolated geniuses that appear when least expected in the most unsuspected places. As González Gutiérrez's text reveals, without the contact with his colleagues, without the studies and bibliography of the College of Surgery
of Cadiz, without his various trips on the various ships, especially without the trip in the corvette Atrevida, in Malaspina's expedition, he would never have been able to reach the technical level he reached.