On the morning of 27 February, in the assembly hall of the Hospital Clínic de Barcelona, Professor Cristòbal Pera gave a lecture entitled "The necessary reform of 1972 and its consequences". This was followed at 10.30 by a round table led by Professor Pera on "Specific aspects of the reform", in which the lecturers Miguel Ángel Asenjo, Ciril Rozman and Joan Rodés took part.

Medicine has been officially taught in Barcelona since 1401, in the reign of King Marti. In Catalonia as a whole the first records of medical teaching date from 1300 or even earlier, in Lleida, though the studies were not organized by an Estudi General, the term used at the time to refer to a university. The origins of the Faculty of Medicine at the UB date back to 1760, when the College of Surgery was set up by Pere Virgili, but it was not until 1843 that the forerunner of the present-day faculty opened in the carrer del Carme. From 1843 to 1906, the faculty remained in the old building of the Hospital de Santa Creu in the carrer del Carme. In 1906, amid a great deal of publicity, the faculty moved to its new site, a building designed by the architect Domènec i Estapà in carrer Casanova. Teaching activity began in October 1906 and the Hospital Clínic of Barcelona received its first patients in January 1907.

With more than 500 lecturers and 1,400 students, the UB Faculty of Medicine is a leader in the fields of medical teaching and professional training. The faculty is located on the carrer Casanova, next to the Hospital Clínic, with which it forms a unit. The faculty's other site is the Bellvitge campus, alongside another large university hospital, the Bellvitge Hospital. On these two campuses all the classes in the degree course in medicine are offered. The Hospital de Sant Joan de Déu is the faculty's third large teaching hospital, where students receive theoretical and practical training in pediatrics and gynecology and obstetrics. In recent years, much of the clinical teaching in the third, fourth, fifth and sixth years of the degree has been transferred to a group of associated hospitals in the area, such as the Hospital del Sagrat Cor and Hospital Dos de Maig in Barcelona, the Hospital de l'Esperit Sant in Santa Coloma de Gramenet, the Hospital General de l'Hospitalet, the Hospital de Viladecans, the Hospital General de Granollers and the Hospital Mútua de Terrassa. Several outpatient care centres in the city also participate in clinical teaching.

The Faculty of Medicine is divided into departments which organize the teaching of the subjects in the degree course. Faculty members combine their teaching duties with research, which is carried out in research groups and under the aegis of the organizations such as IDIBAPS, the August Pi i Sunyer Biomedical Research Institute at the Hospital Clínic, and IDIBELL, the Biomedical Research Institute at the Bellvitge campus. The coordination between the basic and clinical research carried out in the departments and the cooperation between department members and affiliated researchers have been vital in promoting highly competitive translational research and in transferring the results to the community as a whole.

The University of Barcelona, the Hospital Clínic and IDIBAPS are among the leaders in terms of scientific productivity in Spain. Over its hundred years of history, the Hospital Clínic has established itself as a major centre of scientific research and as a health care provider of excellence. It has lived through many different periods, due in part to the country's changing political situation. From its foundation until the Civil War (1906-1939), it was mainly a charity hospital, in which the predominant activity was surgery. The second stage, from 1939 to 1972, saw the change from charity to a certain level of public funding, and a shift away from surgery to the internal medicine. The third period, from 1972 until the present, has seen a real transformation towards professionalism and an emphasis on the key role of research, while maintaining a high level of health care.

The events to mark the centenary of the Faculty of Medicine and the Hospital Clínic will continue in June and November 2006.