Contributed by Rafael Carmena, FRCP Edin
Professor Domingo Espinós, FRCP Edin has died in Madrid, aged 72 years, of complications following a car accident. He was born in Alcoy (Alicante, Spain), on December 25, 1932 and earned his medical degree with honours in 1955 from the University of Valencia. He then pursued extensive postgraduate education in UK medical centres: at the Royal Infirmary in Edinburgh, training in internal medicine, cardiology and haematology with Stanley Davidson, Michael Oliver, and Ronald Girdwood; in Cardiff, studying pulmonary diseases with Arthur Thomas, and at Hammersmith with V. Dacie. He returned to Edinburgh, to Girdwood’s laboratory, to learn methods to determine vitamin B12 and folic acid in blood, which became the subject of his doctorate thesis. Upon his return to Spain he was appointed Assistant Professor of Medicine at the Complutense University in Madrid and in 1971 he became Professor of Medicine at the University of Santiago de Compostela. In 1975 he was appointed to the chair of Internal Medicine at the Complutense University in Madrid, were he accomplished a very distinguished academic and clinical career and was head of the Department of Medicine. Always a general internist at heart, he had a special interest in Haematology, particularly in the field of haemolytic anaemia and the thalasemias, where he did important research and published extensively. From 1976 to 1980 he was Medical Director of the University Hospital San Carlos, in Madrid, steering with great success and effort an ancient and complicated institution towards the modern technological hospital that it is today. He was very proud of his election to FRCP Edin in 1978, becoming the first Spanish Fellow of our College. At the time of his death he was also member of the Royal Academy of Medicine and the Royal Academy of Pharmacy in Spain, and Emeritus Professor at the Complutense University in Madrid.