This paper discusses the emergence of Filipino physicians in the Spanish Philippines, focusing on Manila in the late 19th century. The purpose is to consider the historical significance of the medical profession for Filipino society.

The native wealthy people emerged in the 19th century as further an increased quantity of the agricultural products was exported to the world market. They formed an educated wealthy class called Ilustrados which led to the Propaganda Movement, being the basis of the Philippine Revolution. Filipino physicians also were among them and, simultaneously, occupied a part of the medical officers such as Médico Titular and Médico Municipal in the late 19th century.

In the late 19th century, the various governmental organs involved in health care were administratively consolidated, subsuming the Central Committee of Vaccine, the Office of Marine Quarantine and the Médicos Titulares. At the same time, both medicine and welfare in governmental services were connected in the Médicos Municipales by whom free medical services were provided for the poor, in Manila and its suburbs. Such state medicine was launched under the Spanish empire which had been interdependent with the Catholic Church.

The Spanish was given priority in the employment of those medical officers. However, Filipino physicians who obtained the medical licenses from the University of Santo Tomas increased up to the 1890s. Public Pharmacists and vaccinators were also taught at the University of Santo Tomas. On the other hand, through the cholera epidemics in the 1880s and the Philippine Revolution in 1896, some Spanish physicians asked to resign from their own posts and return to Spain. The employment of Spanish and Filipino physicians largely oscillated in the 1890s.

Those physicians dealt with infectious diseases, based on practical use of miasma theory and bacteriology. Regarding cholera, these physicians stressed both prevention and disinfection. As a method of medical treatment, the purgative was, characteristically, administered to cholera patients in cases of abdominal pain and diarrhea. In general, their medical practices were mainly given at patients’ homes, with a treatment of native medicinal plants. Such native medicine hadn’t been separated from Spanish imperial medicine. But, at that time, all Filipino physicians didn’t necessarily follow the medicine promoted by the Spanish empire. For example, one Filipino physician thought that the Spanish medical dignitary not only fell behind western medical science of those days, but also misunderstood native medicine. On the other hand, this physician admired Filipinos’ own medicine. Such critical views against Spanish imperial medicine were succeeded in American colonial times and confronted American medical officers.