[Seed, youth, the land is fertile and the moment, unique!: it is not Neruda, but Gandulfo, the surgeon].
The second and definitive edition of "Crepusculario", the first book of Pablo Neruda, is dedicated by the poet "To Juan Gandulfo, this book of other times, Pablo". Juan Gandulfo, died tragically, at a very young age, in 1931. Juan Gandulfo, remembered in Neruda's memoirs, as the most formidable leader of the Anarchist movement of that time and that engraved in wood the cover and all the illustrations of the first edition of Crepusculario, published in 1923. Neruda qualified these as the "most impressive engravings made by a man that nobody relates to artistic creation". Juan Gandulfo, as a medical student, made the color illustrations used to teach biology and histology by Professor Juan Noe. Juan Gandulfo wrote more than one hundred articles in the magazine "Claridad", pertaining to the Student Federation of Chile. Juan Gandulfo was consequent with his writings and went to jail twice as a student leader and fought a duel for a woman. Later on, with the same vehemence, he dedicated himself to the care of children in the Arriaran Hospital and to teach general surgery at the San Vicente Hospital, but fate truncated his career at the age of 36. This essay is an homage to this man, in the centennial of Pablo Neruda's birth.
Zalaquett
Ricardo
R
Departamento de Enfermedades Cardiovasculares, Facultad de Medicine, Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile, Santiago de Chile.
D002677:Chile; D013502:General Surgery / Q000266:history*; D049673:History, 20th Century; D008093:Literature, Modern; D008513:Medicine in Literature; D011037:Poetry as Topic