Between medical innovation and war propaganda: The Irache Hospital at the Second Carlist War, 1873-1876

Abstract

The Monastery of lrache is another name for the ancient Benedictine abbey of Santa María la Real, located on the slopes of Montejurra, two miles outside Estella, the main city of southwest Navarra. First erected as a tiny church, at least as early as the eighth century, during the Middle Ages it served as a hospital on the pilgrim route to Santiago de Compostela. In the sixteenth century, the Benedictine order built the abbey, then it founded a university college which functioned until its closure in 1824. The abbey continued operating until the 1840s, when the monastery was expropriated by the Spanish Liberal administration as a result of the Ecclesiastical Confiscations of Mendizábal. Some years earlier, Irache had been partially occupied and used as a frontline hospital by the Carlist insurgents during the First Carlist War (1833-40). This conflict was provoked by the branch of the Bourbon dynasty which, after the death of Fernando VII, called for the Salic law of inheritance to be applied. The decision was made to establish the hospital there, as Estella had been adopted as the seat of the insurgents' court during the war.