José Rizal trained as an eye doctor because his mother was going blind
José Rizal switched from philosophy to medicine when he learned his mother was losing her sight, and became an ophthalmologist. He also wrote two novels that inspired a revolution he did not plan. Spain executed him for rebellion in December 1896, and the Philippines treats him as its national hero, though no law ever made it official.
He was born José Mercado on 19 June 1861 in Calamba, Laguna, the seventh child of leaseholders farming land owned by the Dominican Order. The family's paternal line went back to Lam-co, a merchant from Fujian who settled in Calamba in 1697, and his mother's side mixed Chinese mestizo, Spanish, Japanese and Tagalog roots. The surname Rizal came from an 1849 decree ordering Filipinos to choose Spanish surnames from an official list; the family kept using Mercado, and José adopted Rizal only when he enrolled in school in Manila.
His mother Teodora taught him the alphabet at three, and he was reading and writing by five. A Tagalog play he wrote as a boy earned two pesos from a visiting official, and his sleight-of-hand tricks convinced some locals he had supernatural powers. Hardship came early: a favourite sister died aged three, and after a relative accused Teodora of attempted poisoning, she was jailed for two and a half years, forced to walk barefoot to a prison 30 kilometres away. Around the same time the execution of the Gomburza priests in 1872 touched the family through his brother Paciano.
At the Ateneo Municipal de Manila he arrived speaking little Spanish yet soon topped his classes, winning five gold medals in one year and graduating in 1877. At the University of Santo Tomas he studied philosophy to please his father and land surveying on the side, before moving to medicine for his mother's sake. His prize-winning 1879 poem To the Filipino Youth urged young people to build a bright future.
In the 1880s he became a leading voice of the Propaganda Movement for reform under Spain, and his novels Noli Me Tángere of 1887 and El filibusterismo of 1891 are read together as a national epic. A land dispute in Calamba pushed him toward separatism. Days after founding La Liga Filipina he was arrested on 6 July 1892 and exiled to Dapitan in Mindanao, where he met Josephine Bracken. Travelling to Cuba as a volunteer doctor in 1896, he was arrested in Barcelona after revolution erupted, and executed on 30 December.
Source: José Rizal
