[Doctor Ricardo Davila Boza: pioneer of infectious disease specialists in Chile. Hygienist and public health expert].

Dr. Ricardo Dávila Boza (1850 -1937) was a man whose personality had no duplicities, "blunt and kind, Humanisticos with clear and defined convictions." With an illuminated vision and untiring tenacity, he published all sorts of written work: scientific, literary and poetic. He was always ready to defend his ideas but tolerant to other's. This article reviews his work in the hospitals "San José" and "San Juan" in Santiago. He studied the clinical aspects and epidemiology of infectious diseases becoming one of the famous physicians who collaborated in public health from 1870 to 1910. During 21 years he was head of the former Public Hygiene Institute. His work during the bubonic plague and smallpox epidemics on the second half of the nineteenth and the first years of the twentieth centuries was intelligent and shrewd. He was born in La Serena. Later he went back to the north of his country, to Freirina and Copiapó, starting his professional work.