Echegaray
Collier's New Encyclopedia (1921)
JOSÉ (ā-cha-gar-a'), Spanish a dramatist; born in Madrid in 1832. He is author of several treatises on mechanics and civil engineering, and was for a time minister of commerce, of public instruction and finance. Since 1874, when the production of "The Avenger's Bride" opened a new and brilliant life for the Spanish stage, he produced over 70 plays rich in imagination, dramatic force, and lyric talent, though with the true Spaniard's love of the horrible. Of his greatest pieces may be named: "The Great Galeotto"; "Madman or Saint": "Conflict between Two Duties"; "A Merry Life and a Sad Death." The best known of his plays in America is a version of "The Great Galeotto" produced by the Favershams as "The World and His Wife." In 1904 he shared the Nobel prize with Mistral. ECKMÜHL (ekmül), a village of Bavaria, circle of Lower Bavaria, on the Gross Laber, 13 miles S. S. E. of Ratisbon, the scene of a sanguinary battle between the French and Austrians on April 22, 1809, in which the latter were defeated. ECLECTIC SCHOOL OF MEDI- CINE, that school which believes that one should choose himself the best in medicine and not be confined in his choices by those offered by any one school of medical thought. The idea is an old one, going back to ancient times, that the individual is capable of choosing what medicine is good for him. Those following the eclectic school usually reject the experience of established medical practice. The American Eclectic School of Medicine was really founded by Wooster Beach in 1826 when he established an eclectic college in New York. By 1914 there were four such colleges in the United States and the National Eclectic Medical Association was incorporated under the laws of the State of New York. The American school has investigated the use of native American plants for medicinal purposes, believing that in the order of Nature a cure for the special diseases of a locality has been provided by plant growth in that region. Much valuable information has been gained by the painstaking investigation entered upon by school. was the author of a book defending this eclectic method, "The American Practice of Medicine" (New York, 1838).
What Has Changed in the Last Century
Collier's wrote in 1921 as though Echegaray were still at work, but he had in fact died in Madrid on 14 September 1916. The bigger change is to his standing: the "over 70 plays rich in imagination, dramatic force, and lyric talent" that won him a share of the 1904 Nobel Prize with Frédéric Mistral are now little read and rarely staged, and the award is often cited as one of the prize's early misjudgements — younger Spanish writers including Valle-Inclán and Azorín publicly refused to join the national homage paid to him. "El gran galeoto" (The Great Galeotto), the play Americans knew through the Favershams as "The World and His Wife", is the one title that still turns up in histories of the theatre. Ironically, the engineer-minister side of him that the entry treats as a footnote has aged better: his 1874 decree giving the Bank of Spain its monopoly on issuing banknotes shaped Spanish finance for a century.
Written for this edition, 2026.