Jose Rizal was no stranger to epidemics and quarantine. In 1888, as he was about to land in San Francisco from Japan en route to Europe, he was trapped inside the ship for six days. In 1889, the husband of his sister Lucia died during a cholera epidemic.
In 1890, when he was in Paris during a massive flu epidemic in Europe, he mentioned that he had “a few minutes of headache,” hinting that he contracted a mild version of the illness. Rizal may be a hero but his life was not out of this world. In fact, so much of his life would be quite familiar to us, and this includes his encounters with disease as a patient and especially as a physician.
Like many of us who went through the gauntlet of med school, he struggled with his grades when he was at the University of Santo Tomas, with some biographers suggesting that he was frustrated over the old-fashioned curriculum, using one scene in “El Filibusterismo,” in which the students were not even allowed to hold the microscope as evidence. He yearned for more and it was in the Universidad Central de Madrid that he would find the intellectual stimulation with extracurricular activities, at a time when Spain was torn between Liberal and Conservative movements. Thankfully, his medical school notebook has survived the test of time and thanks to Ambeth Ocampo, who took pictures of the actual notebook, I managed to see illustrations from this precious text, mostly dealing with severe cases—sarcomas and carcinomas, as well as surgic.
