Conferências Médicas (“Medical lectures”)

Coimbra University Press, with the sponsorship of Angelini Farmacêutica and support from the Portuguese Society for the Study of Mental Health and the Estarreja Municipal Council, has launched a facsimile edition Egas Moniz’s “Medical Lectures”. “Something that has always intrigued me was trying to understand how someone that did innovative science within the country, a country with scarce economic resources and scarce human and material resources. We are speaking above all of the 1920s to ‘40s, years of crisis, years strongly marked by the 2nd World War,” said João Rui Pita in the opening ceremony, adding “Egas Moniz innovated within the country with scanty resources, he brought fame to Portugal, he was great both inside and outside the country; he won the Nobel Price, he produced something new”.

According to João Rui Pita, Egas Moniz transcended the boundaries of medicine. “He wrote on the history of his country, he left us writings on literature and art, he worked on the history of medicine. He participated in politics, full of idealism, but then abandoned it in disillusionment” and “he kept attentive to the great political and social questions in Portugal and abroad”.

As João Lobo Antunes wrote in the Preface to this work, Egas Moniz was “a fascinating personality due to his complex modernity, ingenious intuition and overwhelming will”. “Medical Lectures” was first published by Portugália Editora in 1945 and compiles two small works by the Nobel Prizewinner in Medicine and Surgery Egas Moniz: “Human generation and the Exeter doctrines” and “Roentgen rays in neurology”.