Mayor Toni Pérez raises the proposal to the plenary session coinciding with the 130th anniversary of the Benidorm native inoculating the first anti-diphtheria serotherapy in the city of Valencia
Benidorm names one of its streets after Doctor Josep Pérez Fuster in honour of his role as a doctor and researcher
The chosen road is the intersection among '9 d'Octubre', 'Llibertat' and Nicaragua Avenues, where the Foietes retirement home is located.
Benidorm City Council is going to recognise the figure of the doctor from Benidorm and researcher Josep Pérez Fuster (Benidorm, 1856-Valencia, 1933) by naming a street in the city after him, thanks to a motion that will be debated and approved at the next plenary session of the Municipal Corporation at the proposal of Mayor Toni Pérez, after having been incorporated today into the agenda of the information committees that will be held tomorrow.
The text highlights that ‘Metge Josep Pérez Fuster’, as the street will be called, “was one of the most relevant figures in Valencian Medicine at the end of the 19th century and played a key role in understanding both the evolution of infectious diseases and in laying the foundations for the fight to eradicate them”; a figure who is also “of international renown” and who, just as he already “has a street in the Valencian capital, deserves at least this recognition in Benidorm, his hometown”.
Toni Pérez explained that in 2025 “it will be 130 years since a historic milestone in the field of medicine and what was known at the time as ‘Public Hygiene’, in which Josep Pérez Fuster had a lot to do” so he considered it “fair to honour this outstanding Benidorm resident and, in turn, to settle a debt that the city had contracted with his relatives and descendants”.
Thus, the mayor indicated that on September 20, 2010, the then local Government Board formed by the PSOE and an unaffiliated councillor, adopted the agreement to ‘Name a public road in the city after Metge Josep Pérez Fuster’, “an agreement that never came to fruition and that we are now going to make effective”, added the first councillor.
Born in Benidorm in 1856, Josep Pérez Fuster graduated in Medicine at the University of Valencia with an Extraordinary Award and received his doctorate from the University of Madrid. He was President of the Medicine Section of the Valencian Medical Institute, Director of the Institute of Hygiene of Valencia and Member of the Royal Academy of Medicine. He died in Valencia in 1933.
His role as a doctor and researcher was key to the arrival of anti-diphtheria serotherapy in Spain. Discovered in 1894, the scientific and general press soon echoed this fact. In October of that year, the municipal plenary session of the Valencia City Council agreed to send José Pérez Fuster to Paris, to the Pasteur Institute and the Trousseau Hospital. In the French capital, where he stayed for three and a half months, Pérez Fuster coincided with other Spanish commissions.
On February 23 1895, the Benidorm native carried out the first inoculation of anti-diphtheria serum in Valencia, an event 130 years old today. In light of this event, and considering that the aforementioned “agreement of the Local Government Board and the file on its cause are unfinished”, the mayor proposed to the Council to name the street among ‘9 d’Octubre’, ‘La Llibertat’ and Nicaragua, where the retirement home and day centre for the elderly in Foietes is located, as ‘Metge Josep Pérez Fuster’.
The mayor indicated that the new name of the road will be effective, as stated in the motion submitted to the full Council, from the moment of its approval and has announced that the City Council plans to hold an event with the descendants of the doctor Josep Pérez Fuster, later on, to pay public tribute to him.