Don’t forget to remember

Speaking some weeks ago to some young specialists, I was surprised that they did not know a person who, in my opinion, has been the most important professional in the history of arthroscopy in this country.

His name was Pau Golanó. A genius. My friend.

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Dr. Ángel Calvo Díaz (left) and Dr. Pau Golanó (right) at the XVI Congress of the ESSKA held in Amsterdam in 2014.

This last month of July marked 7 years since his sudden death, and this has been time enough for some of our younger professionals to not even know him. I'm sure that if you now "google" on this, you'll be very much surprised.

He wasn't a surgeon. He was simply a Professor of Anatomy at the University of Barcelona... and the most creative individual I have ever met.

He arrived and created a revolution of it all. He taught us all "another way to see the anatomy": anatomy from the inside. His careful and endless dissections, and his passion for scientific photography, gave value and rigor to what until then had been the passion of a few crazy surgeons trying to use optics to look inside a joint.

His other passion was training, and this led him to "invent" arthroscopy courses on cadavers. What is now taken to be common and routine was unheard of back in the nineties. There was a two-year waiting list to participate in these courses.

In one of them I met him as a pupil, and in the next he accepted me to contribute as a teacher. This was a true honour for me - one of the greatest in my life - and I clearly remember the emotion of the moment, when I had to hide my tears.

We were friends since then. True friends. There was an 11-month age difference between us, and we shared hard discs full of anatomical and arthroscopic images.

In the decade of 2000-2010, with both of us forming part of the Teaching Commission of the AEA, we started the "Pau style" courses in other universities, such as those of Málaga and Valladolid. With this initiative, the Departments of Anatomy changed and acquired dynamics unknown until then.

I belonged to that small group of friends for whom Pau gave it all.

He only had one problem: he wasn't a surgeon; he was much more, but this was not appreciated at the time. Despite the fact that for decades there had been no speech in which he was not named or his images were not used, and although he was held in high esteem at the Universities of Miami and Pittsburgh, where he had been working, he was not appreciated enough. Even though he had won all the prizes. Perhaps if he had been born in another country...

The last time I saw Pau was at the Congress of the European Society for Sports Traumatology, Knee Surgery and Arthroscopy (ESSKA) in Amsterdam, two months before his sudden death. And like always, we had a great time.

On 23 July 2014, we lost an unrepeatable genius, but above all a special friend, crazy, temperamental, sincere (too sincere), but very pleasant and very much a friend to his friends. Seven years have gone by, and I still miss him.

For this reason and for much more, it displeases me to see that the names of surgeons are remembered forever because they invented techniques. Pau invented no techniques, but he gave a reason and scientific justification to all of them.

And he was one of us. I will never tire of reminding you to not forget to remember.

Dr. Ángel Calvo Díaz
Arthrosport Zaragoza/Huesca/Alicante
Ex-Chairman of the AEA and of the ESA-ESSKA

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Dr. Ángel Calvo Díaz