Michael O'Gorman

Michael O'Gorman was born in Ennis, Co. Clare, in the mid-eighteenth century. McKenna, Edmundo Murray and a Royal Academy of Medicine in Ireland lecture notice give 1749; a search summary of a Wikipedia-derived mirror gives both 1736 and 1749. McKenna says he trained in France and Spain and left Spain for Buenos Aires in 1777 under a royal order, the year after the city became capital of the new Viceroyalty of the Río de la Plata. He stayed until his death in 1819.

An Argentine medical-history editorial by Carlos Grasso Fontán says O'Gorman promoted the creation of the Protomedicato of the Río de la Plata with Viceroy Vértiz in 1780, under royal authorisation. The Protomedicato licensed and examined doctors, surgeons and pharmacists and enforced health measures. O'Gorman drafted the first regulations of the medical school, dated there to 1801, and held its chair of medicine, later passing it to Cosme Argerich. The search summary dates the Protomedicato to 1779 or 1780 and the school to 1799, and adds that he was personal physician to Viceroys Cevallos and Vértiz and gave the first smallpox vaccinations in Buenos Aires; none of that has been checked against an opened source. McKenna's statement that he founded the faculty of medicine in 1780 seems to run the Protomedicato and the later school together. The notice of a 2015 lecture by Susan Wilkinson calls him the founder of modern medicine in Argentina.

He was related to the merchant Thomas O'Gorman, grandfather of Camila O'Gorman; McKenna calls them cousins, and Murray says only that they were related. O'Gorman was one of the Spanish-trained Irish professionals who reached the River Plate as subjects of the Spanish crown, not as members of an Irish community.