Manuel Concha, con la mano en el corazón

On May 10, 1986, at the Reina Sofía Hospital in Córdoba, a forty-three-year-old surgeon completed the first heart transplant performed in Andalusia. His name was Manuel Concha Ruiz, and that day, without fully realizing it, he began to write one of the most luminous chapters in Andalusian medicine. Four decades later, with nearly three hundred and fifty transplants to his credit—many of them on children—Dr. Concha's heart beats with the same intensity, now divided between writing, sailing, conversation, and tireless cultural patronage between Córdoba and Cádiz, his two beloved cities. Manuel Concha, with his hand on his heart, reconstructs, from his own words—written and spoken—the life of a man who made surgery a priesthood and curiosity a way of life: the boy from Cádiz who dreamed of the sea, the resident who trained alongside the pioneers of Puerta de Hierro, the head of service who started from scratch in a newly opened hospital, the humanist capable of speaking with the same passion about a transplant and a painting by Julio Romero de Torres.