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| Victoria Grande Fort in Melilla, Northern Africa, then a prison facility of the Spanish empire where Dr. Pio Valenzuela was imprisoned as a prisoner of war while he was "used" as a prison doctor, 1897-1899. Photo: https://www.arc-magazine.com/victoria-grande-fort-morocco/. |
The Revolutionary as a Country Doctor
By Valentin C. Loyola
Published in This Week,30 November 1958
Dr. Valenzuela joined secret Katipunan society as medical student; later, he devoted his time to medical practice, finally became Bulacan governor.
Much has been written about the revolutionary activities of General Pio Valenzuela, one in the triumvirate that formed the original nucleus of the secret Katipunan society. But his career in public health has been mentioned only sparingly and fleetingly. Yet, his lifetime work as a country doctor was the best known of his humanitarian activities that endeared him to the people of his province and to his comrades-in-arm in the Katipunan, just as his intense patriotism and exemplary heroism won him the admiration of his countrymen.
“Medicine was his first love,” says Mrs. Mercedes Los Baños, the general’s third child. “We were told that at an early age he showed such interest in medicine that his parents thought he would settle down solely as a medical practitioner.”
“He told me that it was his obsession to see all his sons take careers in medicine,” said Dr. Rosalinda Garcia-Valenzuela, wife of Dr. Diego Valenzuela, the only son of the late revolucionariowho is a doctor. “All the four sons started courses in medicine, but it was only my husband who pursued the course to the finish; the rest switched to other courses.”
Don Pio, as the revolutionary hero was lovingly called in Polo, Bulacan, actually started his medical practice when he was only a medical student. At that time, the services of physicians were at a premium, and the University of Santo Tomas student had to answer sick calls out of sheer necessity.
Valenzuela was a senior medical student at the only medical school in the country, the UST College of Medicine, when on July 15, 1892, he joined the Katipunan, which was then only eight days old. He was then only twenty-three years old. Never a man to do things half-heartedly, he quickly rose to the top hierarchy of the Katipunan supreme council, which was composed of Andres Bonifacio, the supremo; Emilio Jacinto, the secretary-general; and himself, the fiscal general. The triumvirate exercised the power to take the life of anyone found guilty of treachery.
Between attending secret sessions with the supreme council, Valenzuela nibbled away at his studies, ultimately finishing his medical course in 1895.
The General had much use for his medical training during the horror-filled Katipunan days. In his “Memoirs of the K.K.K. and the Philippine Revolution,” he wrote: “…While living on Lavezares Street (Manila) I also organized many branches of the Katipunan in various municipalities of Rizal and Bulacan, practising my profession at the same time, accepting fees from those who gave them voluntarily although I never charged anybody. I also gave medicine to the poor, and even set up a small drug store on Lavezares Street under the care of Faustino Duque, who prepared my prescriptions for free distribution to the poor patients.”
Dr. Valenzuela’s most well-known exploit was his mission to contact Dr. Jose Rizal in Dapitan, Zamboanga, where the latter was exiled by the Spanish authorities. Valenzuela was only able to accomplish the mission by using his profession as a “front” to disguise his true role in that particularly dangerous activity.
On May 1, 1896, a general meeting of about sixty Katipuneros presided by Andres Bonifacio was held in Sitio Ugong, a comparatively unpopulated place in the town of Pasig (Rizal). Valenzuela presented a motion for the solicitation of voluntary contributions with which to buy arms and munitions from Japan. With the procurement of arms, the armed rebellion, aimed at the overthrow of the Spanish government, could be hastened. The motion was unanimously approved after much debate, but with the condition that it be first submitted to Dr. Jose Rizal in Dapitan for approval.
The meeting, which started in the house of a Katipunan member at eleven o’clock at night, was suspended at four o’clock the following morning to allow for a brief rest and a much-delayed meal. The meeting was resumed in seventeen small bancas, which headed for Bitukang Manok river leading to Antipolo. In that floating confab Valenzuela was elected to undertake the task of contacting Rizal. The meeting was ended at eleven o’clock in the morning of May 2ndby the simple ceremony of firing two revolvers–one by Bonifacio and the other by Emilio Aguinaldo.
About his trip to Dapitan, Valenzuela wrote: “With a round-trip first-class ticket which cost me sixty pesos, and under an assumed name of Procopio Bonifacio, I embarked on the steamship Venus on Monday, June 15, 1896, between ten and eleven o’clock in the morning, accompanied by Raymundo Mata, a blind man, and Rufino Magos, both residents of Barrio Binakayan, Kawit, Cavite, who were deck passengers. On the boat as first-class passengers were three women – Josefina Bracken, Narcisa Rizal, and Angelica Lopez, wife, sister, and niece, respectively of Dr. Rizal.”
Of course, it was not the chief objective of his visit to Rizal to bring Raymundo Mata for eye treatment, but had he not devised the trick, this mission would have been his undoing. Only ten minutes after he was introduced to Dr. Rizal, at the latter’s house, a man came with a letter from the governor. The governor wanted to know from Rizal the nature of the business of the visitors. Having been told by Rizal that one was the physician of the blind man and the third an attendant, the governor was satisfied.
Having conferred with Rizal, during which the exile approved the plan for an armed rebellion, provided arms and munitions could be secured first and the rich and influential Filipinos could be won over to the cause, Valenzuela sailed back on the Venus to report to the supreme council on his mission.
Before the boat reached Manila, Valenzuela was forced to make known his true identity. A Spanish sergeant of the civil guards, who embarked at Iloilo, died of hemoptisis on the boat. For the boat to enter Manila without quarantine restrictions, a death certificate was necessary. The captain of the boat learned that he was not Procopio Bonifacio, but Dr. Pio Valenzuela.
Dr. Valenzuela’s professional training came in handy again when he was imprisoned by the Spaniards in November, 1896, with a life sentence slapped on him by Governor-General Ramon Blanco. In his three long years of incarceration, which brought him from Manila’s Fort Santiago to the prisons of Spain and North Africa, at least he had the distinction of serving as the prison doctor. It was at the instance of this prison doctor, who swore that Antonio Luna was not a Katipunan member, that he (Luna) was sprung from a Barcelona prison. This act of Valenzuela released to the revolutionary movement an outstanding military strategist.
Brought home after the Treaty of Paris, Valenzuela was kept from some time in prison in a house in Intramuros, Manila, within stone’s throw of his former Alma Mater, San Juan de Letran College. Other prisoners were released earlier after they swore not to bear arms against the new conquerors, the Americans, but Valenzuela was set free in early part of 1899.
After having served briefly as the first American-appointed mayor of Polo, Bulacan, his hometown, he accepted the position as health officer of the sanitary division composing the towns of Obando, Polo, Meycauayan, and Marilao. His acceptance of the position was an acceptance of a challenge, for at that time Polo and the neighbouring towns, and many provinces for that matter, were in the grip of a cholera epidemic.
For nineteen years the former fiery revolutionary leader toiled among his people, fighting epidemics and generally working for the better health conditions of his people. As public health man, Dr. Pio Valenzuela became a legend in Bulacan.
Stories are many about his benevolence. People paid only when they could afford to pay for medical service – and no specific rate was charged from patients. Some, who were too poor to pay, even went home not only with free medicines from the family botica, but also with a little amount of money from the doctor’s pocket.
It is said that he was the despair of some medical practitioners in the area. Some doctors wanted to set up a uniform rate for patients calling from out-the-way places. But Dr. Valenzuela could not bring himself into this kind of business discipline. Sometimes he went on calls that cost him half a day of his time, and all he would earn was fifty centavos or none at all.
“But even as he was generous to those who could not afford to pay for medical services, he had very little patience with those who broke the health rules that he set,” said Mrs. Los Baños. “He was the ideal public servant.”
Mornings he would go to a place where fresh milk was being peddled. When he saw adulterated milk for sale, he would pour it on the ground. Puto and cookies for sale that were not properly covered suffered the same fate. Meat that was sold in the market without the benefit of inspection found its way into the dump no matter who owned it.
Dr. Valenzuela was the Number One sworn enemy of prostitution in his home town. Even during his time, bawdy-house girls spilled over to suburbs, including Polo. When he heard of the presence of such girls, he would give orders not to allow them to leave his municipality without medical clearance certificates.
And woe to the people who were the recipient of his bounties for having pretended that they were destitute and, afterwards, seen by the doctor indulging in costly funerals! Those were the times when the doctor hit the ceiling, so to say.
These activities were carried on at the time when he was raising a family. Early in his job, as president of the sanitary division, he married Marciana de Castro, also of Polo. How he carried on in his family life may be gleaned from an important event in the family, fifty-three years after the wedding bells rang for the Valenzuelas. In July, 1953, the Valenzuela family was the recipient of the award of “The Filipino Family of 1953,” from the Women’s Civic Assembly. The other family that obtained the same award that year was the Ramon Magsaysay family.
It was for his name as revolutionary leader and for his reputation as a philanthropic, public health official that the leaders of the Democrata Party, in Bulacan, asked Dr. Valenzuela to run for governor. At first, he refused, but he was later unable to turn his back to the persistent pleadings of Teodoro Sandico and Jose Padilla, Sr. (both served as Bulacan governors), who convinced him that it was a good fight. Only one year before he could have retired as a government doctor, he threw his hat into the political ring, running against a Quezon man, Juan Pascual, of San Miguel.
“The first returns showed that my father won,” reminisced Mrs. Los Baños. “As a matter of fact, he was acclaimed winner and people flocked to our old stone house to congratulate the old man. Later, he was told that he lost by a small majority.”
Valenzuela knew that he was cheated. This disconcerting knowledge brought out again the fighting spirit that had always been his since the prime of his manhood. So he girded himself for a long court battle to contest the election. The case dragged on in the court of first instance, and while it did, he sold a great deal of his property piece by piece to finance the costly legal battle. He did not care if he lost his lands and money: he did not relish being made a sucker by unscrupulous politicians.
Dissatisfied with the decision of lower courts, he elevated the case to the highest court of the land – and he won! His victory, however, cost him a fortune, not to mention the life pension which he could have reaped as a government worker in one more year of service.
The term had still ten months to go, and that’s how long he sat as governor for that term.
But to clinch his belief that he could win in a clean election hands down, he ran again. He defeated his rival by a resounding majority.
Marciana Valenzuela was not enthusiastic on her husband getting enmeshed in politics. Were she not used to her husband’s philanthropies, she could have been more dismayed to find that the governor almost always used his salary to advance the salaries of other employees who did not get their wages on time.
Until his death, this grand old man of Bulacan practised his profession. Many discriminating people of Polo and the surrounding towns thought that no doctor was good enough for them if it was not Dr. Valenzuela. One of the men who was vocal on the proficiency of the old doctor was Dr. Antonio Villarama, onetime secretary of the department of health. Dr. Villarama never forgot how Dr. Valenzuela saved his life by the latter’s skill as a physician.
One of the important milestones of his medical career was when the Bulacan Medical Society awarded him a plaque, commemorating the golden jubilee of his practice in medicine. The Manila Medical Society could not be outdone, and it likewise remembered him with another golden jubilee award. At the time of his death, Don Pio was sixty-one years in the practice of medicine.
Another humanitarian activity of the late patriot and hero that the Polo people do not forget was his interest in education. Out of his pocket, he rented school rooms for classes that could not be accommodated in government buildings or government-rented buildings.
Don Pio died on April 6, 1956, at the age of eighty-seven. Surviving him was his wife, who was then only seventy-one; his children Abelardo now fifty-seven, chief of the training department of the Industrial Development Corporation; Arturo, fifty-four, with the bureau of customs; Mercedes, fifty-one, a Bachelor of Science in Education, now married to Engineer Joaquin Los Baños; Rosa, pharmaceutical chemist, now married to Fernando Tecson; Amadeo, forty-four, an executive of the Manila Trading and Supply; Alicia, forty, single, principal of the Marilao elementary school; and Diego, thirty-seven, genecology and obstetrics consultant at the North General hospital, in Manila.
Mrs. Marciana Valenzuela died on June 14, 1958, at the age of seventy-three.
When the family was awarded the title of “The Filipino Family of 1953,” the couple had forty-one grandchildren and nine great-grandchildren. “Now there are more,” said Dr. Rosalinda Garcia-Valenzuela, cuddling her youngest son, Pio II, who is five years old.
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| The Valenzuela Family was awarded as the "Family of the Year" in Malacanang in 1953. |
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