The voice of Galicia
Carlos Corts
Monforte / The Voice
17/02/2021 12:20 h
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The doctor Matas Garca-Alba Pardo died this Wednesday in Monforte at 85 years of age. Born in Cervantes on July 2, 1935, he developed his entire professional career as a gynecologist in Monforte, where he had a clinic where between the late 1950s and well into the 1990s thousands of women gave birth. Until the opening of the regional hospital in 1986 the vast majority of Monforte’s babies were born in his clinic. As he recalled in an interview a few years ago, more than 14,000 women gave birth at his clinic.
Matas Garca-Alba study baccalaureate in Chantada, where he grew up because his father, an agent of the Civil Guard, was stationed there. Determined to be a doctor, he got a Ramn y Cajal scholarship and enrolled at the University of Santiago. Both the degree and her subsequent doctorate cum laude with a thesis on breast cancer were completed between Santiago and Madrid. Shortly after training as a doctor and specializing in gynecology, the Virgen de la Luz clinic opened in Monforte at the beginning of the 1960s, which was the first private maternity hospital in the province of Lugo.
Located in its first years on Roberto Baamonde street, it immediately moved to what would be its definitive location on Ourense street. In the Virgen de la Luz clinic, most of the monfortinos came to the world born in the 60s, 70s and 80s. According to himself, he had an unwritten pact with his clients by which he did not charge for a delivery more than it would have cost the mother to go to Lugo to give birth in the hospital in the capital of the province and return later. to Monforte.
When Dr. Matas, as he was known in Monforte, opened that clinic, he did so in reality thinking of transferring it to the city of Lugo in the medium term. However, his success was such that He and his wife, Mara Teresa Fantini Garca, decided to stay in Monforte. He as a doctor and she as a midwife, dedicated their entire professional life to the Virgen de la Luz clinic and made Monforte their definitive place of residence. In this town they had their seven children: Matas, Manuel, Jos, Santi (who died in a traffic accident in 1988), Sindo, Antonio and Carlos Csar.
Retired in 2005, his old clinic is still open, but now transformed into a nursing home. Matas Garca-Alba had been in poor health for a long time and it was not so easy to see walking through Monforte with his wife or children and stopping every few steps to chat with friends and neighbors, many of them former clients of her maternity ward. In 2016 he participated in the inauguration ceremony in Monforte of the Doctor Matas clinic, a project run by his son, the neurosurgeon Manuel Garca Fantini, who wanted to start up a medical center in Monforte with state-of-the-art equipment and 16 specialties.
The funeral for Matas Garca-Alba Pardo will be held this Thursday at eleven o’clock in the morning in the church of the Piarists. The body of the deceased will be transferred there from the Ral funeral home and after the religious service it will be buried in the municipal cemetery of Monforte.
