January 2008

The Science series is made up of two self adhesive stamps devoted to Medicine and Meteorology. Both depict some of the most representative elements of these two sciences.

Meteorology

Meteorology is a branch of geophysics that studies the phenomenon that occur in the atmosphere. As an applied science it also serves to forecast the weather and the climate changes. In Spain the organism in charge is the National Institute of Meteorology (INM) founded in 1860 which has automatic observatories all over the country for the collection and tracking of data. Besides the surveillance and weather forecast, it collaborates in environmental policies, it makes 23,000 forecasts every year by Comunidades Autonomas, 100.000 specific forecasts for airports and 5.000 for maritime areas near the coast. The INM depends on the Ministry of Environment and is member of the World Meteorological Organisation (WMO) with headquarters in Geneva which aims at worldwide cooperation, the rapid exchange of information, promotion of standardization of meteorological and related observations and to ensure the uniform publication of observations and statistics.

Medicine

The application of the medical sciences to heal and prevent diseases has always been linked to the history of humanity and has been approached with a different view throughout history. In primitive societies the ill were considered as impure and the cause of illness was believed to be divine. Civilizations like the Egyptian have left evidence of a more advanced medicine and the Greeks, Romans, Jews and Arabs, deepened in the study of the medical science which has not ceased to evolve throughout the centuries. The progress in the knowledge of diseases and the anatomy of the human body have given way to new fields of investigation that during the XIX Century have taken the medical science into the contemporary era with the application of new techniques in continuous progress.