José Echegaray (1904) (22)

José Echegaray (1904) (22)

José Echegaray y Eizaguirre was born in Madrid to parents of Basque descent. The family moved to Murcia, where his father held a professorship in Greek at the Institute of Murcia. At the age of fourteen Echegaray returned to Madrid. In 1853 he graduated from the Escuela de Caminos and became in 1858 a professor of mathematics of the same institute. In 1857 he married Ana Perfecta Estrada; they had one daughter.

After a short period as a practicing engineer, Echegaray taught mathematics until 1868. Echegaray’s papers and treatments appeared in El Imparcial, the Revista contemporánea, Ilustración española y americana, the Diario de la marina de la Habana, El liberal, and other newspapers and magazines. Between the years 1859 and 1860 he published several articles on free trade. He observed the solar eclipse of 1860 in northern Spain, and went to the Alps to study the construction of the Mont Cenis tunnel.

Echegaray’s scientific works, such as Problemas de Geometría Analítica (1865, Problems in Analytical Geometry) and Teorías modernas de la Física. Unidad de las fuerzas materiales (1867, Modern Theories of Physics), gained him fame as the foremost Spanish mathematician of his time. “Time was when every cultured person knew Latin,” he once said. “Time will come – and it is not very far off – when every cultured person will have to know mathematics!” (‘La Escuela Especial de Ingenieros de Caminos, Canales y Puertos y las Ciencias Matemáticas,’ Revista de Obras Públicas 44, 1897).

Dr. Jose J. Echegaray is the founder and director of Retina Consultants of Orlando. He is certified by the American Board of Ophthalmology and has sub-specialty training in Retinal Surgery and Ocular Oncology. As a new Central Florida resident, he is committed to delivering compassionate care to all patients using cutting-edge technology for the diagnosis and management of retinal diseases and ocular tumors.

Dr. Echegaray was born and raised in San Juan, Puerto Rico. He completed his undergraduate training with a Bachelor of Arts in Neurosciences at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia, where he served as a Gates Scholar. He then returned home to Puerto Rico to complete his medical degree at the Ponce Health Sciences University, graduating with Honors and Distinction. During medical school, he served as a one-year National Institutes of Health Research Fellow in Ocular Immunology at the Bascom Palmer Eye Institute of the University of Miami Miller School of Medicine. He then completed a pre-residency fellowship in Ocular Pathology, also at Bascom Palmer. He completed his Residency training in Ophthalmology at the University of Puerto Rico School of Medicine, where he served as Chief Resident and was honored with the Vista Scholarship Fund Award.

For his sub-specialty training, Dr. Echegaray completed a clinical fellowship in Ophthalmic Oncology at the world-renowned Cleveland Clinic, training in the clinical and surgical management of adult and pediatric ocular tumors. He then returned to Miami to complete a two-year Vitreoretinal Diseases and Surgery Fellowship at the Bascom Palmer Eye Institute, perennially ranked as the #1 Eye Hospital in the United States.

Prior to his relocation to Central Florida, Dr. Echegaray served as Assistant Professor of Ophthalmology and Staff Physician at the University Hospitals Cleveland Medical Center and Case Western Reserve University School of Medicine in Cleveland, Ohio. As faculty at University Hospitals/Case Western, he led a busy academic practice serving the Northeast Ohio community. During his time in Cleveland, he was most grateful to be directly involved in the training of medical students, Ophthalmology residents, and Retina fellows. For his commitment to teaching, research, and patient care, he was honored with an Award of Excellence by his colleagues in the Retina Service.

Clinically, Dr. Echegaray specializes in the medical and surgical management of retinal and macular diseases, including diabetic retinopathy, age-related macular degeneration, retinal vascular occlusive disease, retinal detachment, high myopia, epiretinal membranes, vitreomacular traction syndrome, macular holes, ocular trauma, secondary intraocular lenses, and intraocular tumors.

His clinical research interests include outcomes in complex retinal detachment repair, novel surgical techniques for macular hole surgery, and novel techniques in secondary intraocular lens placement. He currently serves as Co-Editor of a textbook, titled Complex Retinal Detachment Surgery.

His research has been sponsored by the National Institutes of Health and the Vitreoretinal Surgery Foundation. He has a special interest in studying patient outcomes of novel vitreoretinal surgical techniques. Dr. Echegaray also has a genuine interest in the optimization of chemotherapy and radiation-based treatment regimens for adult and pediatric intraocular tumors, such as vitreoretinal lymphoma, choroidal melanoma, and retinoblastoma. He has published numerous peer-reviewed articles, reviews, and book chapters, and has presented his research in national and international meetings. He actively contributes as Ocular Oncology Section Editor for the journal Current Ophthalmology Reports and serves as an Ad-hoc reviewer for several Ophthalmic journals.

Dr. Echegaray has a genuine passion for Ophthalmic education and has been directly involved in the training of medical students, residents, and fellows. He currently serves as Adjunct Assistant Professor at the Case Western Reserve University. He is a member of the American Academy of Ophthalmology, the American Society of Retinal Specialists, the Florida Society of Ophthalmology, and the Vit-Buckle Society. Dr. Echegaray is fluent in English and Spanish. Outside the office, he enjoys spending time with his wife, son, and family, and is an avid sports fan.

Playwright José Echegaray was a respected mathematician before turning to theater, and also served as head of several different Ministries in the revolutionary government that followed the toppling of Queen Isabella II. He generally withdrew from public life after the Spanish monarchy was restored to power. His first play, El libro talonario (The Checkbook), was written in his late-30s and not produced until he was 42 years of age, but after its success he became a prolific playwright, authoring dozens of plays that were wildly popular in his native Spain.

Echegaray served in various official posts. He was named minister of commerce in the 1860s and elected to the Cortes, the Spanish parliament in 1869. He also played a major role in developing the Banco de España. In 1866 he entered the Academy of Exact Sciences of Madrid with a lecture on the history of pure mathematics in Spain  (Historia de las Matemáticas puras en nuestra España).

From his youth, Echegaray was enthusiastic about drama. Alexandre Dumas’s Ricardo Darlington (1831), which Echegaray saw in Madrid in 1853, had a deep impact on him. The play was based on Sir Walter Scott’s novel The Surgeon’s Daughter. In 1865 he wrote a play entitled La hija natural, which was followed by El libro talonario, produced in 1874 at the theatro Espanol under the pseudonym Jorge Hayaseca y Eizaguirre. In spite of the pseudonym, which he formed  by selecting only the letters that occur in his given name, it was soon discovered that the dramatist was Echegaray, then Spain’s Minister of Finance.

El libro talonario was not successful. It was born in temporary exile in Paris during the period of the First Republic (1873-74). Echegary wrote it to show to his brother, a noted playright, how easily it could be done, as playing a game of chess or solving a mathematical problem. Following General Manuel Pavia’s coup d’état, which ended Emilio Castelar’s short-lived republic, he returned to Spain and was appointed minister of the Treasury.

After a prominent political career, Echegaray devoted himself over the next decades to writing, producing average of two plays a year.  Although he was open to progressive social ideas, his work appealed to the upper middle classes rather than to the masses. In defining his artistic aims, Echegaray wrote in a poem that his theatre is not one of half tones: “I pick a passion, take an idea, a problem, a characteristic, and I bury it, just like dynamite, in the depths of a charcter that my mind creates. The plot surrounds that character with some puppets who are either trampled into the filthy mud or who shine in the sun’s bright light. I light the fuse. The fire spreads, the shell explodes without fail and the main star is the one who pays for it.

Until Echegeray’s most notable plays, the Spanish theatre had not attracted international interest for a long time. About half of his sixty dramas were composed in verse, many of them had a melodramatic title: La esposa del vengador (1874, The Avenger’s Wife), En puño de la espada (1875, At the Hilt of the Sword), En el Seno de la muerte (1879, In the Bosom of Death), La muerte en los labios (1880, The Taste of Death), etc. O locura ó santidad (1877, Madman or Saint), which was translated into English in 1895, brought him international recognition. In the story Lorenzo Avendaño inherits a fortune, but after discovering that he is not the real heir of the wealth, he tries to give it back. However, his greedy relatives have other plans, and Lorenzo is placed in an asylum.

From the 1870s to the early 1900s, Echegaray was the leading Spanish dramatist. He was elected to the Royal Spanish Academy in 1894 and in 1904 he served briefly as head of the Treasury. In 1912 he received the Order of the Golden Fleece by King Alfonso XII. The literary generation that followed Echegaray, the so-called Generation of 1898, saw that his dramas represented the old school – virtue is rewarded and vice punished. However, often Echegaray’s innocent characters were also vulnerable to unforeseen consequences of fate and they were punished as well as the wicked

His works pioneered the scripted use of relatively elaborate special effects to add to the illusion of stage plays, including the first controlled use of dynamite in theater. His most popular and widely produced play was El gran Galeoto (The Great Galeotto), a melodrama in which a man’s platonic love for a married woman is intentionally misunderstood. He shared the 1904 Nobel Prize for Literature with French poet Frédéric Mistral, and died in 1916. Echegaray’s plays have rarely been produced in recent decades.