Francisco Javier Muñiz: The First Argentine Naturalist and Pioneer in Science

Francisco Javier Muñiz in his youth. He was 11 years old when he fought in the second English invasion

In the second English invasion, men, women and even children joined the street fighting. An 11-year-old who had joined the Andaluces corps was stationed with other volunteers on a rooftop at the back of the San Miguel church. He did not hesitate when he was ordered to go down to the street to face a platoon of British advancing half a block away. The boy was shot in his right leg and the next day the projectile was removed in the church of San Francisco, where a hospital had been improvised to care for the wounded, both Creoles and English.

The boy was Francisco Javier Muñiz, destined to do important things. He would heal from his wound and thus become the first Argentine naturalist, the initiator of paleontology in the country and was a precursor in the application of the vaccine.

He participated in the Brazilian war and had to heal his friend Lavalle from a wound.

He was born in San Isidro on December 21, 1795 and studied at the Colegio de San Carlos. After 1810, together with canon José León Banegas, he participated in the drafting of the Manifesto of the Literary Patriotic Society.

He entered the Military Medical Institute, created by the Assembly of the Year Only in September 1844 was he able to present his thesis and received his doctorate.

In Patagones, he was the doctor of the second garrison and then to Chascomús, where he was a surgeon and organized the first field hospital. There he began a friendship with Juan Lavalle.

In the area he found remains of a tatú or large armadillo, the first time in history that they had been discovered, and when he found bones of a glyptodont, he did not record the fact and the Frenchman Alcide D’Orbigny did so some time later, to whom They gave him all the credit.

He was also one of the many doctors who assisted the wounded in the battle of Caseros on February 3, 1852.

In the war against Brazil he was a surgeon alongside Francisco de Paula Rivero and after Ituzaingó he cured his friend Lavalle when a bullet pierced his thigh. He returned to Buenos Aires with a medal on his chest.

It is a mystery what happened to the collection of stones that he put together in that war; he had taken one in every action or deed in which he participated, and each one was accompanied by a legend. He mourned the loss, as he wanted to send them to a museum.

When the School of Medicine was created in 1827, he had to fight it and had to ask Bernardino Rivadavia for help to be accepted into the chair of Childbirth, Women’s Diseases and Legal Medicine.

Together with his wife Ramona Bastarte, whom he had married in September 1828 – they would have eight children – he went to live in Luján in the house that was the one used by the viceroy. For about twenty years there he was a doctor, he administered the smallpox vaccine to everyone and, of course, continued his obsession with searching for fossils along the river.

With the English naturalist Charles Darwin, who had been in the country, they corresponded and shared knowledge

As a result of his studies and observations, he discovered what he called “spontaneous blisters” on the udders of cows. He experimented with vaccines that replaced the English ones after the import ban ordered by Juan Manuel de Rosas. His fame crossed the ocean. In 1832 he was made a member of the Royal Jennerian Society of London for his studies on this vaccine.

During the Rosas government, he was a police doctor and treated the powerful governor for his prostate.

He also dealt with geology and developed a theory explained in Topographical Notes of the Territory and Adjacencies of the Central Department of the Province of Buenos Aires.

He fought the scarlet fever epidemic. On March 13, 1844, he announced a description and cure of this disease, with which he inaugurated pediatric medical literature in the country, but when he published his conclusions they were outdated due to the advances achieved. He was also the first to experiment with vaccines against skin diseases.

Whoever has the opportunity to visit Paris, be sure to take a look at the National Museum of Natural History, because there is an important collection of fossils collected by Muñiz. In 1841 he gave Rosas eleven boxes with fossils, the product of years of excursions through the Buenos Aires pampas. The governor wanted to show that our country was advanced and that it also dealt with science, and he gave them to Admiral Dupotet, the Frenchman who commanded the blockade fleet, who sent them to his country.

But Muñiz continued exploring and discovering. First he was a fossil bear, a Lestodon and in 1844 the fossil tiger or Muñifelis bonaerensis, and he sent everything to the museum. With the English naturalist Charles Darwin, with whom he corresponded, he explained the characteristics of the “ñata cow”, extinct and which was of interest to the British.

As a consequence of the Anglo-French blockade of the Río de la Plata, there was a shortage of products, including vaccines. Muñiz vaccinated her own daughter and traveled with her to Buenos Aires and inoculated dozens of individuals.

He was also one of the doctors who cared for the wounded in the battle of Caseros. After the fall of Rosas, he presided over the School of Medicine between 1858 and 1862. In 1853 he had been elected deputy and a year later senator. He was a constituent congressman in 1853 and 1860.

Sarmiento had the idea of ​​compiling the work of this doctor and researcher into a book.

He was a renowned Mason. By 1853 he joined the Concordia Lodge of the City of Buenos Aires and in 1856 he joined the Argentine Confraternity Lodge No. 2.

Of course it was risky to be a doctor on the battlefields. In Cepeda, October 23, 1859, he was speared in the chest while treating the wounded, and was a prisoner of Urquiza. Once released, Miter promoted him to honorary graduate colonel.

Thanks to him, women entered the university for the first time, when in 1855 he organized the faculty and the School of Midwives, being president of the Faculty of Medical Sciences.

Muñiz in his adulthood. He was known for his study of fossils and for his research on diseases and vaccines.

He published the first Argentine monograph on tocogynecology “Forced extraction of an almost full-term fetus.”

He was 70 years old when he appeared before General Juan Andrés Gelly y Obes to participate in the War of the Triple Alliance as a war surgeon. He organized Corrientes hospitals and was in the battles of Yatay and Uruguayana. When the cholera epidemic broke out, he assisted Javier Francisco, one of his sons, in his last moments. He returned to Buenos Aires in 1868 when his wife died, and in 1869 his body said enough and he retired from the army.

He lived retired in Morón and contracted yellow fever, caring for a family friend, Francisco López Torres, at home.

He died on Sunday, April 9, 1871, the day on which the highest number of victims from the epidemic was recorded. Former commissioner Carlos Munilla, administrator of the Sud Cemetery, ordered a grave to be dug at the entrance to the necropolis. He had chosen a preferred place for that illustrious dead man.

Monument in honor of those killed by yellow fever, a disease that Muñiz contracted while caring for a friend

Domingo F. Sarmiento, who compiled his works in 1885, said that Muñiz “was a martyr to the profession.” A hospital in the city of Buenos Aires is named after this man who was a doctor and much more.

Sources: Life and writings of Colonel D. Francisco J. Muñiz, by Domingo F. Sarmiento; The Deans of the Faculty of Medicine of the University of Buenos Aires, by Alfredo Buzzi and Federico Pérgola.

2023-12-21 06:06:00
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