Professor Carlos Jiménez Díaz was born in Madrid in 1898. Besides his other achievements, he was one of Spain’s most outstanding medical doctors of the 20th century.

​

It was he who closed the then-prevalent cycle of dogmatic medicine with little scientific basis, opening a new era marked by modernization and alignment with the new world of medicine in the aspects of care, teaching and research. He was doubtless the last great total clinician, a “knower of all there is to know”, in the words of Laín Entralgo.

​

He addressed those three aspects of medicine and contributed the world’s first immunosuppressant treatment with nitrogen mustard, long before the use of steroids, in what were then known as damaging auto plasma disorders (nowadays as autoimmune diseases).

​

He defended the theory and conducted experimental work on “the transcendent role of the secretion of active substances via the vascular endothelium” in arterial hypertension and revolutionized the concept of allergy, besides performing the world’s second cardiac catheterization. He was the only Spanish physician who attained the honour of heading two international societies (Internal Medicine and Allergy).

​

In Spain he created the first medical research institute, enabling exclusive dedication to such work in its basic and clinical aspects. Subsequently, following the tragic interval of the Civil War, after which he had to start anew, he achieved his dream of a ‘total centre’ that would combine all aspects: the Clinica de la Concepción, later the Fundación Jiménez Díaz, in his honour. Thus began a stage in the pioneering transformation of the old concept of hospital into a place devoted to science, developing therein all specialties with their own services.

​

There he also modernized undergraduate and postgraduate teaching, taking the first steps toward formal specialization for new graduates.