Objective:

to reconstruct and contextualise the working career of a nurse and surgeon at the beginning of the 19th century.

Methods:

phenomenological and hermeneutic study of primary and secondary documentation.

Results:

born in 1797 and minor surgeon in 1821. He joined the city hospital as a nurse, resigning after three years to take an examination in major surgery. He worked as a surgeon in Vitoria prison, having to combine his work with other occupations in order to earn a decent salary. He was politically targeted at the beginning of the Carlist War and had to abandon his work, and was not documented again until the cholera epidemic of 1855. He died in 1860.

Conclusions:

he was a nurse opportunistically in order to gain access to the hospital and accumulate the experience required by the College of Surgery. Surgery did not provide him with economic advantages, but rather the precariousness of work common to other empirical surgeons. Dependence on public contracts and political ups and downs suggest the existence at the beginning of the 19th century of practices similar to those of the caciques at the end of the century.