Jos Protasio Rizal Mercado y Alonso Realonda,[7] widely known as Jos Rizal (Spanish

pronunciation: [xose risal]; June 19, 1861 December 30, 1896), was a Filipino
nationalist and polymath during the tail end of the Spanish colonial period of the Philippines.
An ophthalmologist by profession, Rizal became a writer and a key member of the
FilipinoPropaganda Movement which advocated political reforms for the colony under Spain.

He was executed by the Spanish colonial government for the crime of rebellion after the Philippine
Revolution, inspired in part by his writings, broke out. Though he was not actively involved in its
planning or conduct, he ultimately approved of its goals which eventually led to Philippine
independence.

He is widely considered one of the greatest heroes of the Philippines and has been recommended to
be so honored by an officially empaneled National Heroes Committee. However, no law, executive
order or proclamation has been enacted or issued officially proclaiming any Filipino historical figure
as a national hero.[8] He was the author of the novels Noli Me Tngere[9] and El filibusterismo,[10] and a
number of poems and essays.[11][12]
Jos Rizal was born in 1861 to Francisco Mercado and Teodora Alonso in the town
of Calamba in Laguna province. He had nine sisters and one brother. His parents were leaseholders
of a hacienda and an accompanying rice farm by theDominicans. Both their families had adopted the
additional surnames of Rizal and Realonda in 1849, after Governor GeneralNarciso Clavera y
Zalda decreed the adoption of Spanish surnames among the Filipinos for census purposes (though
they already had Spanish names).

Rizal first studied under Justiniano Aquino Cruz in Bian, Laguna, before he was sent
to Manila.[19] As to his father's request, he took the entrance examination in Colegio de San Juan de
Letran but he then enrolled at the Ateneo Municipal de Manilaand graduated as one of the nine
students in his class declared sobresaliente or outstanding. He continued his education at
the Ateneo Municipal de Manila to obtain a land surveyor and assessor's degree, and at the same
time at the University of Santo Tomas where he did take up a preparatory course in law.[20] Upon
learning that his mother was going blind, he decided to switch to medicine at the medical school of
Santo Tomas specializing later in ophthalmology.

Without his parents' knowledge and consent, but secretly supported by his brother Paciano, he
traveled alone to Madrid, Spain in May 1882 and studied medicine at the Universidad Central de
Madrid where he earned the degree, Licentiate in Medicine. He also attended medical lectures at
the University of Paris and the University of Heidelberg. In Berlin, he was inducted as a member of
the Berlin Ethnological Society and the Berlin Anthropological Society under the patronage of the
famous pathologist Rudolf Virchow. Following custom, he delivered an address in German in April
1887 before the Anthropological Society on the orthography and structure of the Tagalog language.
He left Heidelberg a poem, "A las flores del Heidelberg", which was both an evocation and a prayer
for the welfare of his native land and the unification of common values between East and West.