Our history
Jaime Planas Guasch performed surgery on the front lines during the Spanish Civil War. Afterwards, in the emergency department of Hospital Clínic, in a Barcelona devastated by war, he continued operating as best he could: beneath an X-ray screen, without any protection, searching for bullets lodged in his patients' bodies and sewing needles embedded in women's skin, back when floors were still scrubbed on hands and knees.
The radiation gradually burned his left hand. A professor of dermatology gave him a stark prognosis: if he continued operating, his fingers would have to be amputated within ten years. For a surgeon, this was more than an injury. It was the end of his career. And he knew it better than anyone, because in Spain at that time, when a wound refused to heal, medicine had only one answer: amputation.
He told his parents nothing. He saved for years, bought a thousand dollars from a friar who received them from Venezuela, since dollars were unavailable in Spain, and on 24 November 1947, at the age of 32, boarded a cargo ship bound for New Orleans. There, the first patient he saw had suffered devastating burns to both legs, just like a patient in Barcelona whose legs had been ordered amputated. Yet this man could walk. "If that man had been treated in Barcelona, he would no longer have his legs," he wrote.
In St. Louis, Dr. James Barrett Brown replaced the burned skin on his fingers with skin grafted from his own leg. Before entering the operating room, alone in an unfamiliar country, he left a letter outlining his final wishes at the Spanish Consulate. He emerged with his hands saved, but also with something more:
he had discovered a form of medicine that did not amputate, but reconstructed.
He stayed for almost two years to master it, travelling from St. Louis to San Francisco, before returning to Spain, a country where the specialty did not yet even have a name. To practise it, he had to give up the general surgery he loved. And he did.
He went on to found and serve as president of the Spanish Society of Plastic Surgery, trained hundreds of surgeons from around the world and, on 10 October 1971, opened Clínica Planas in Barcelona as a place to operate, research and teach.
More than half a century later, everything we are today can be traced back to those hands that were almost lost, and to the man who devoted the rest of his life to saving those of others.
