Vannie Arrocha and his work on ‘La Doctora’

“It is difficult to reconstruct a life based on sources,” says poet and journalist Vannie Arrocha about the research work she undertook to make her book “La Doctora-Lidia Sogandares. The First Female Doctor of Panama” a reality, a work that is already in its second edition.

It is a book that collects the biography of V the first female surgeon and the first obstetrician-gynecologist from Panama, Lidia Sogandares.

Arrocha, who is also style editor, He talks in detail about what his path was to making this book a reality.

Information about the doctor was found from primary sources (letters, photographs, conversations with relatives and friends, patients and doctors), secondary sources and bibliographic references.

In 2014, when she started researching Lidia Sogandares, there was only a review on the Internet that the Panamanian Society of Obstetrics and Gynecology has on its website. Today you can find a lot of information and most of it is related to “my research”.

challenges

For Arrocha, the most difficult thing in this journey of telling the story of Sogandares is that in 2014, 43 years have passed since her death and the character of Lidia has been forgotten.

“Information was scattered: in Ernesto J. Castillero National Library I found information about his student career in Panama and his development as a professional; in the library of Georgetown University, in Washington DC, I found information about his personal and family life,” says Panama America.

“When I decided to write about Lidia Sogandares, my goal was always to make a biography of a person, with virtues and flaws, and not to make her a saint. Not knowing her was a limitation: although since 2014 I had access to a rich oral source in the person of Carmen Sogandares from Mackenzie, Lidia’s niece, I would like to ask the same doctor why she didn’t get married, how hard it was to break with the tradition that all the doctors were men at Santo Tomás Hospital, which led her to blurt out the sentence: ‘I never acted like a woman, but as a doctor,’ she says.

Spent time and economic resources: “I spent seven years doing research in my spare time. (on vacations and even while I was unemployed) I financed it myself. Before the trip to Washington, I applied for sponsorship but was unsuccessful. Right at the end of the book, I knocked on the door of the Panamanian Society of Obstetrics and Gynecology and they helped me with the printing of the book ‘La Doctora – Lidia Sogandares. The first Panamanian doctor”.

Projects

“I want to continue researching the women of the century XX who contributed to the minting the country’s history, like the feminist Esther Neira de Calvo or the nurse Enriqueta Morales, but that will be later,” he advances.