He died this Wednesday, at the age of 95, at the Miguel Servet hospital in Zaragoza / A year ago, in an interview with this newspaper, he recalled his years of training in the US, where in Baltimore he ended up being head of resident doctors
The Aragonese doctor Fernando Alonso-Lej de las Casas has died this Wednesday at the Miguel Servet hospital in Zaragoza at the age of 95, as reported by the family. He is a reference in the world of medicine because he was the creator of the system MIR in Spain, a process among recent Medicine graduates that is still in force.
In an interview with EL PERIÓDICO DE ARAGÓN, from the Prensa Ibérica group, a year ago, he recalled that his “dream” was to follow in his father’s footsteps and become a doctor. To do this, he soon went to the US to acquire knowledge and, as soon as he could, he returned to Spain to apply everything he learned.
Alonso-Lej did General Surgery and then the specialty of Cardiothoracic Surgery in Baltimore, where he spent nine years. There he ended up being chief medical resident and the instructor of future health workers, a period in which the idea of the MIR seriously matured. «The name Training of Postgraduate Physicians was very long. had to put a smaller word, that was constant and did not change. One day in the office I thought of Internal and Resident Physicians, because they were people who lived in the hospital, and then the word MIR came up,” Alonso-Lej pointed out in the last interview with this newspaper.
He returned to his native Zaragoza, where he lived until his death, in 1975 to be Head of Thoracic and Cardiovascular Surgery at the Miguel Servet Hospital in Zaragoza until 1998. In 2019, the Zaragoza City Council recognized him as an Exemplary Zaragozano.