Salvador Gil Vernet was a leading global figure in Urology in the mid-twentieth century. His work remains important.
Published in the Diari de Tarragona on 4 September 2018
Salvador Gil Vernet (Vandellòs, 1892 - Barcelona, 1987) loved biology. As a child, when the school year drew to a close in Tarragona and he went home to Vandellòs, he enjoyed his summer holidays classifying and studying plants with the help of a botanical key book.
His dream was to become a Professor of Natural Sciences. He studied High School at the General and Technical Institute of Tarragona. He was an excellent student. But his plans changed. “When he finished school, for reasons I’m not aware of, he changed botany for medicine,” according to his grandson José María Gil-Vernet (Barcelona, 1957), who has just published a book about his grandfather The Art of Transforming Science. Salvador Gil Vernet’s modern understanding of Urologic Anatomy.
Salvador Gil Vernet was going to become a botanist, but instead ended up a prestigious physician.
Salvador Gil Vernet became a prestigious urologist. In the 1950s and 1960s, the Urology Department of the Clinical Hospital of Barcelona, which he was head of, became an international benchmark in this field. “Leading specialists from Europe and the Americas came to learn new laboratory and surgical techniques,” explains José María, also a urologist and with his own centre in the Catalan capital.
Salvador’s biggest contribution was precise knowledge of the prostate: for the first time, he established an anatomical subdivision of the prostate gland in different zones or regions, which served to demonstrate that diseases such as benign prostatic hyperplasia or cancer arose in different areas.
His anatomical research represented a giant step forward in Urology. So much so that several national and international scientific societies put his name forward at the time for the Nobel Prize for Medicine. “I believe that if he’d carried out his research with more extensive resources and technological support, he’d have opened new research areas in physiology and urogenital biochemistry and would have been a strong candidate for the Nobel Prize. He always felt he lacked support from other basic disciplines that would have supplemented and boosted his studies,” adds his grandson.
In fact, in 1972, the physician from Vandellòs wrote: “I’m convinced that if a Urology professor had an in-depth knowledge of physics and biochemistry, he’d be in a position to solve problems as yet unresolved.”
Salvador Gil Vernet was a physician and researcher not content with knowing the skills of his field. He wanted to lay down a scientific groundwork. Aged 25, he pioneered an epidural anaesthesia technique that, through the sacral canal, was sufficient for prostate operations. In his dual condition as anatomist and urologist, he conducted extensive research in the microscopic and topographic anatomy of the pelvis and perineum.
“This knowledge allowed him to discover, among other findings, the exact layout of nerves controlling erections, and the precise structure of the prostate and external urethral sphincter. From there, he was able to develop new surgical techniques to more effectively treat prostate cancer, which caused less disfiguring, respecting the erection and urinary continence to the extent possible,” José María explains.
His research attracted so much interest that an Italian urologist from the University of Florence, Professor Francesco de Gironcoli, asked him to write a book in English collecting his works on morphology and the function of the urogenital musculature. The book was released in 1968, and to this day, fifty years later, is still cited in scientific publications.
Salvador was also named president of the International Urology Society in 1967, a position he held until 1973. He is the only Spanish urologist to have achieved such an honour. The American Nobel Laureate Charles Huggins invited him to give a series of lectures at the University of Chicago in 1962.
Gil Vernet greeting King Baudouin of Belgium during the first International Symposium on Urodynamics, held in 1971 in Aachen, Germany.
The physician from Vandellòs enjoyed professional success, but what was he like as a person? “He introverted, but affectionate with his grandchildren. I remember him as a tireless worker, even though he had already retired. He spent afternoons working on his publications and dictating the works that my cousin Salvador, also a physician and a specialist in Nephrology and kidney transplants, typed up on an old typewriter,” José María adds.
He lived abroad in France and Italy when he was young. Just before the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War, on 19 August 1936, the Republican government of Manuel Azaña halted his teaching duties as a Professor at the University of Barcelona (six more of his colleagues were in the same situation). “It marked the beginning of the persecution of the professors who didn’t conform with the ideas of the Government of the Second Republic. Later, a target of the anarchists, he was forced to go into exile. His eldest son, Salvador, an adolescent, was captured and taken to the San Elías gaol for interrogation about the location of his father,” his grandson recounts.
Salvador abandoned Barcelona with protection from the French and Nicaraguan consulates and left for France aboard the French vessel Cortés II. He lived in Toulouse and then went to Italy, where he took part in the foundation of the Mediterranean Urology Association.
José María has followed in the footsteps of his father -also a urologist- and his grandfather, considered his benchmark. “I greatly admire how he was able to overcome all the obstacles and limitations of his time to focus on the problems posed by urology, with a scientific approach,” he concludes.