Fernando Alonso-Lej, creator of the MIR system, dies

In an interview with ‘El Periódico de Aragón’, of the Prensa Ibérica group, a year ago, he recalled that. his “dream” was to follow in his father’s footsteps. and become a doctor. To this end, he soon went to the USA to acquire knowledge and, as soon as he could, he returned to Spain to apply everything he had learned.

Alonso-Lej did General Surgery and then the specialty of Cardiothoracic Surgery in Baltimore, where he spent nine years. There he ended up being chief resident physician and the instructor of future sanitarians, a period in which the idea of the MIR seriously matured. “The name of Postgraduate Medical Training was very long. It was necessary to put a smaller word, which was constant and did not change. One day in the office I thought of Médicos Internos y Residentes, because they were people who lived in the hospital, and then the word MIR came up,” Alonso-Lej pointed out in the last interview with this newspaper.

To his native Zaragoza, where he has lived until his death, he returned in 1975 to be. chief of Thoracic and Cardiovascular Surgery at the Miguel Servet Hospital in Zaragoza until 1998. In 2019, he was recognized by the City Council of Zaragoza as an Exemplary Zaragozano.