2023-09-08 05:28:47
By Moraima Salom Villalba *
After a brief account of the performance of the doctor Raúl Bernett y Córdova (Cartagena, January 15, 1893 – West Covina, California, United States, March 31, 1991), as Mayor of Cartagena (October 1935 – November 1936), published In this same space, we now present other features of his biography related to his contributions to medicine.
learn’Raúl Bernett y Córdova, mayor of Cartagena de Indias October 1935 – November 1936‘.
To refer to Bernett, I will collect some phrases that he used when he wrote about the life of his friend and colleague Teofrasto Antonio Tatis Madrid (Cartagena, 1865 – 1930): Nothing more fair than honoring the memory of those people who have stood out by carrying out works for benefit of their fellow men.
Next to the “apostolic figure” by Teofrasto Tatis had affinities with the medical specialty of Obstetrics and the Nursing School. Tatis in 1907 established a Gynecology Clinic in the Hospital de Caridad, which after a reform was renamed Hospital Santa Clara for having been transferred to the convent of the same name, during that same reform, presided over by him, the School of nurses and midwives attached to the Faculty of Medicine of the University of Cartagena, officially. Therefore, the rise of both works is due to his initiative and they were continued by Bernett, who began a close friendship with his colleague upon his return from North America, with his doctorate, from the University of Pennsylvania and found in Tatis a benefactor for his first operations and space for “the new ideas that he brought, the fruit of the teachings and observations” of the American clinics, where he had spent eight years.
From then on, Bernett had been involved, as if he had never been absent, in all academic and medical activities, and continued to publish his poetry in the local press. So much so, that another of his colleagues, Alfonso Bonilla Naar, said of him: “Since 1917 he was a champion of reforms both in teaching and in professional practice.”
Contributions to the development of Medicine
Bernett occupies a prominent place in the medical history of Cartagena for his contribution with outstanding facts in medicine and surgery:
* First bacteriologically confirmed diagnosis of typhoid fever in Cartagena, recently arrived from the United States in 1917.
* First diagnosis of Landry’s ascending palsy.
* Use of ether for the first time as a general anesthetic in a gynecological intervention at the Santa Clara Hospital, practiced by Raúl Bernett C., ending the custom of chloroform.
* Removal of the spleen (splenectomy), for the first time, successfully, at the Santa Clara Hospital, in 1932.
Nursing school
The foundation of the Bernett Clinic, in January 1924, by Raúl Bernett y Córdova, is considered the first private hospital in Cartagena, with its own School of Nursing and endowed with a modern clinical laboratory, directed by Joy Lucile Tench, an American nurse who , in turn, was the Director of the school. Its first graduates were Rita Leonor Yances Espitia (1927) and María de Jesús Rivera (1935). The first’s degree thesis was on ‘The role of the nurse in symptomatic fevers in the tropics’, and the second presented a paper on ‘Asepsis and surgery’.
As in the second decade of the 20th century, the baccalaureate for women in Colombia was still deficient, which made it difficult for them to enter the university and the conception that they had of them as a passive being in decision-making was still latent, the teacher of the University of Cartagena, Yadira Ferreira Simmonds, warns “the foreign influence in the beginnings of the School of Nursing in Cartagena, since the departmental government saw it necessary to create a new teaching position that would be in charge of the direction of the School, was so, several foreign nurses arrived. Situation that was also reproduced in the private hospital with the arrival of Miss Tench.
However, Carmen de Arco de la Torre is an exception, who in her capacity as a nurse in the maternity field, held positions of responsibility such as head nurse at the Casa de Salud from 1913 to 1926 and later founded her own maternity home establishment. She entered as a student at the first school that she opened, in 1903, the doctor Jorge Calvo and after three years of study the departmental government recognized her training and the school issued her diploma. On completing thirty years of uninterrupted work, homage was paid to her and statistics of the births she attended during that cycle of her professional life were published. There were 6,587 cases of deliveries, classified in the following order:
“The previous data constitutes an admirable record for a professional and especially in this environment where it is emulated by the low”, explained the journalistic note. In difficult deliveries for the extraction of the child, she was assisted by doctors Bernett y Córdova, Franco Pareja, Vargas Vélez, Calvo Castaño and Obregón Flórez, among others.
The Casa de Salud de Cartagena was a private establishment with the purpose of satisfying the demand for medical resources both locally and regionally, located in the Manga neighborhood and with the capacity to perform “all kinds of surgical intervention, from the incision of the skin to the transcendental operations of high surgery”. Its foundation was in charge of doctors Rafael Calvo, Antonio R. Blanco, Manuel F. Obregón and Nicolás Macario Paz.
Although the Bernett Hospital stopped working in Cartagena, the doctor moved to the city of Bogotá at the beginning of the forties of the 20th century, where he inaugurated the Bernett Clinic, on Avenida Chile, in a new phase of his life.
In the capital, she continued her work to promote the vocation of a nurse. So, she took steps, as a Member of the Nursing Committee and in association with the Faculty of Nursing of the Javeriana University, several television programs were prepared to talk about the university studies of that faculty.
Epilogue
His parents Venancio Bernett Ávila (Freemason), and Martina Córdova, had five children and owned the first existing funeral home in Cartagena, in the first decade of the 20th century. Upon returning, Raúl, from the United States, with a doctor’s degree, decided to sell it because they considered the business incompatible with his son’s profession. Subsequently, Venancio was part of the Board of Directors of the Bernett Clinic as Administrator-Treasurer.
Raúl Bernett y Córdova, descendant of Colonel Josep Bernet and Macario Córdova, one of the old doctors who practiced medicine in Cartagena, was a doctor, poet and mayor respected for his qualities and appreciated by the public. In 1935, when Rivera took a nursing degree, Rita Yances was the Director of the School and had become the wife of Bernett, whose first marriage to Rebekak Shaver had come to an end. With the young woman from Cordoba, she adopted, as her son, George Edward Bernett Yances (Bogotá DC, May 16, 1935 – Laguna Woods, California, United States, March 29, 2022).
Dr. Bernett held various positions, including General Director of Municipal Hygiene and Health of Cartagena; deputy director of the National Red Cross; President of the Cartagena Academy of History; professor at the University of Cartagena and member of several national and international Academies of History and Medicine.
* Social communicator
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