User:Rod.rso/Wenceslau Dutrem Solanich

Wenceslau Dutrem Solanich (Mieres, Spain, 1877 - Mexico City, Mexico, June 16, 1957) was a priest, barber, pharmacist, chemist, and Catalan anarchist.

Childhood
Wenceslau Luis and Agustín Dutrem Solanich was born in Mieres, Girona, in 1877, to Jaume José Antonio Casademont Dutrem (1846-1921) and Elionor Rosalia Ramona Solanich Masoliver (1845-)

As the eldest son of a family with strong religious convictions, he was forced to become a priest upon his father's death, just as his older sister was forced to become a nun. He hung up his habits following his father's death since his will caused enough problems for the family to be left without most of their assets, which ended up in ecclesiastical hands. He maintained like his five brothers exercising the trade of barber until he obtained a degree in Pharmacy.

Wenceslau lived in Castellbell i el Vilar a small Catalonian municipality, where he studied as a pharmacist from 1919 to 1922 and married Angela Dominguez and Ortelli Barelli. The marriage had three children, Eliseu (lawyer and pharmacist), Wenceslau (physician and pharmacist), and Marta Dutrem (lawyer). He was the owner of a pharmacy in Barcelona with his own laboratory which was located at number 50 of Carrer de Sant Pere where several famous products were formulated such as Erotyl judging by the advertising of the time.

Pharmacy and medicine
Wenceslau worked as a pharmacist in several Catalan towns, among them Olot, Lés and Castellbell, and Vilar.After settling in Barcelona again after the first world war, Wenceslao opened a pharmacy at Carrer de Sant Pere Més Alt, number 50 in the first years of the 1920s. It was here that he set up his laboratory and where he sold the aforementioned Erotyl in the middle of the year 1920. The price of the product was not insignificant: 21.75 pesetas. Or maybe it did since it promised eternal youth and assured that it could be taken with "the greatest and most absolute confidence to be completely harmless."

Erotyl enjoyed great popularity in Barcelona in the late 1920s and early 1930s. It was advertised above all in the so-called "psycholeptics publications" (now they would be called erotic), such as La Tuies and the Papitu, but it was also discussed in satirical weekly magazines such as El Be Negre. In Papitu it was common for a joke to be published above the ad that referred to Erotyl. Here are two of these jokes that weren't always so politically correct. As you can see, Dutrem also manufactured other products, such as Ginelasa-Vaginoides, Gonicideol, and Antilueticos Dutrem, all of them related to sexual activity. Dutrem´s products were also advertised in hand-held programs distributed by music halls and other places of entertainment, such as this one, where Erotyl shares the lead with the incomparable Bella Dorita.

Anarchism
Wenceslau strongly disagreed with the monarchy, and in this extremist and propaganda context is where the attack against Alfonso XIII on May 31, 1906, when the wedding procession was attacked with a bomb thrown by the anarchist Mateu Morral. The "Dutrem Semovich" of the accounts of the Spanish modernist literati was none other than Wenceslau Dutrem Solanich.

Life in Catalonia
Dutrem used to sell medicines through Spain and France, at a time when Russian and Polish medicines were in great demand. As he knew how to communicate in Russian and German, he pretended to be Russian, or Polish, introducing himself as "Wenceslau Semovich", instead of Solanich. The writer Suara mentioned in his article that he was very surprised "to see an anarchist who had a pharmaceutical laboratory" which led to the discussion of whether an anarchist could earn money or not, saying that at the meeting there was the author of the royal attack.

Civil War and exile
When the Spanish Civil War broke out, the couple was with their youngest daughter Marta in Mallorca, from where they left for Paris in the summer of 1936. The two eldest sons Wenceslao and Eliseo stayed in Spain for 4 months in the republican area where Wenceslau and Eliseo the eldest brothers and doctor Serafina Palma, which belonged to the PSUC (Unified Socialist Party of Catalonia) saw the great bloodshed caused by the war and were the ones who wrote to Dr. Frederic Duran and Jordà suggesting the creation of a blood bank in Barcelona.

Wenceslau wouldn't be reunited with his sons till the winter of that year in Paris.

From France, they traveled to Mexican exile aboard the steamer Flandre. On November 1, 1938, they arrived on Mexican soil, at the port of Veracruz. Dutrem was a beneficiary of the Spanish Refugee Evacuation Service (SERE). When he arrived in Mexico he had to start over and there he founded the Farbar Laboratories (Farmaceuticos Barcelona), a company in which his three children also worked. Meanwhile, in Spain, he was trialed in Barcelona for Political Responsibilities.

Death
Wenceslau Dutrem y Solanich died at 2:20 on June 16, 1957, in Mexico City, at the age of eighty, due to heart failure and cerebral sclerosis.

His body was buried in the Villa Obregón garden cemetery in 1957 in Mexico City.