César Uribe Piedrahita
(Medellín, 1897-Bogotá, 1951) Colombian doctor and writer.Wise in science and letters, in his time he embodied the ideal of Renaissance humanism, and left a brief but intense literary production characterized by his deep concern for the problems of his nation and, in general, for the demand for a series of social reforms, political, economic and cultural that contribute to improve the living conditions of the less favored classes.
In his youth, inclined towards the study of scientific disciplines, he studied Medicine at the University of Antioquia, where he graduated in 1922 to complete his medical training in the North American classrooms of Harvard.He was soon considered an eminence in his facultative specialty (parasitology), before leaving Harvard University he had already carried out various teaching and research functions there, for which, on his return to his native country, he was appointed director of the National Institute of Hygiene.
From this position, César Uribe Piedrahita began a series of innumerable journeys through the interior of his country, which took him, among many other places, to the forests of Darién and Caquetá, and to the eastern plains of Colombia, where his lively humanistic curiosity allowed him to learn various indigenous languages, at the same time that it encouraged him to consolidate one of the largest collections of the various species that make up the fauna and flora of those lands.
Dumped, above all, to the toxicology of flora and parasitology, his scientific prestige increased dramatically by all the cultural forums of Colombia when he managed to develop the first antidote manufactured in Colombia against snake venom.Apart from these fruitful investigations carried out in his own country, Uribe Piedrahita also disseminated his medical knowledge to other parts of the world, such as Egypt (where he was called to speak in a tropical medicine congress) and Mexico (where he actively participated in a forum on indigenous problems).
In addition to the scientific work carried out at the head of the aforementioned National Institute of Hygiene, César Uribe contributed significantly to the improvement of sanitary conditions in his country from his teaching position at the National University, where he taught for many years parasitology classes.Later, he was appointed rector of the University of Cauca (1931-1932), where he convulsed the traditional social and moral guidelines of the more affluent classes of the city of Popayán, first because of his spirited initiative to promote sexual education among young people, and later for his defense of physical exercise in the open air.
In addition, in his multifaceted cultivation of all disciplines of knowledge, César Uribe also distinguished himself by his efforts to create a prestigious choir in Popayán, where he astonished those who went to hear some of his violin interpretations.Years later, already settled permanently in the capital of Colombia, he successfully cultivated painting and wood sculpture, and came to offer several artistic exhibitions in Bogotá, where he lost his life at the age of fifty-four, affected by serious problems of alcoholism.
Three years before his disappearance, César Uribe had suffered the loss of thousands of annotations in which he treasured some of his most important scientific observations, collected throughout his brilliant career as a specialist in parasitology and toxicology.Such misfortune occurred on April 9, 1948, when the social and political unrest that broke out in Bogotá caused, among other serious incidents, a fire that destroyed the famous CUP laboratories, founded by Uribe himself and baptized with the initials of his name..
His literary work
The echoes of the Russian Revolution, which occurred when César Uribe was twenty years old, led to a considerable part of the intellectuals and Hispanic American artists became aware of the vexations that oppressed the less favored classes of the subcontinent.This generated a broad political-social movement aimed at the construction of a new society in which the great differences would be abolished, a trend in which to insert all the creative work, and even the scientific work, of César Uribe.
Indeed, the literary work of the Medellín writer (composed only of two novels, a short story and the fragments of a third long narrative which was left unfinished at the time of his death) postulates the creation of a new society in which the construction of the "new man" is, in turn, possible, a being free from tyranny and oppression who, in these novels, they are embodied in the fierce imperialist rule of the big oil companies of the United States of America.
In his first literary installment, presented under the title of Toá.Narraciones de caucherías (1933), César Uribe recounts the life of a protagonist who is nothing but the author's own literary transcript, in a period of his life that took him in 1924 to southern Colombia and to Venezuelan lands, to take over the management of the hospital from the SUN oil company.
Something similar happened with his second narrative installment, which, like Toá, was not considered by Uribe Piedrahita as a proper novel, but as the fictionalized account of those years of his life.It is about Mancha de Aceite (1935), a work that some scholars of Latin American Letters identify with a text by José Eustasio Rivera entitled La mancha negra , which was lost among the papers left in New York by the author of The Maelstrom at the time of his sudden death.In addition to the astonishing coincidence in the title, the subject dealt with in both texts (oil exploitation) and the common anti-imperialist stance of the two Colombian writers allow one to conjecture that the draft by José Eustasio Rivera reached the hands of Uribe Piedrahita, who decided to continue On his own the work started by one of the writers who had most influenced his work.
The rest of the brief work of the Medellín writer is completed with the story entitled Sebastián de las Gracias and with the fragments that, in life, he published his unfinished novel , screened under the title of The Caribbean .
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