Egas Moniz, DR. Antônio Caetano

(1874-1955)

   Pioneer physician and neurosurgeon, sometime republican political figure, and minister during the First Republic, and Portugal's only Nobel Prize winner until 1998 (when the Nobel Prize in Literature was awarded to José Saramago). Trained as a doctor at Coimbra University's medical school, Egas Moniz was named a professor in 1902. In 1911, after having studied at several clinics in France, he was transferred to the Chair of Neurology at the University of Lisbon.

   In 1903, he began his involvement in politics when he was elected a deputy to the monarchy's parliament. During the early and middle phases of the First Republic, Egas Moniz became one of the more important moderate republican personalities in the Constituent Assembly, a leading member of José Almeida's Evolutionist Party, a founder of the Centrist Party, and a staunch supporter of presidentialism and President Sidônio Pais. In a sense a prophet without honor during some of the more difficult phases of the turbulent republic, Egas Moniz was Portugal's minister to Spain in 1917-18, then minister of foreign affairs. During 1919, he headed Portugal's delegation to the Versailles Peace Conference. Exhausted and disillusioned with politics and government service by mid-1919, he devoted the remainder of his active life to medical practice and neurological research and writing.

   In 1927, after intensive experimentation, Egas Moniz performed the first cerebral angiography on a patient; this X-ray provided vital information on the brain in terms of blood circulation within it, the most significant finding in half a century. In 1935, he pioneered a new type of brain operation. His great contributions to medicine and to neurosurgery were finally recognized in 1949, when he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Medicine for the discovery of the uses of leucotomy in certain psychoses. His two fascinating memoirs (Confidencias de um Investigador Científico, 1949, and A Nossa Casa, 1950) are among the more significant and prescient of Portuguese memorial works in modern times. A tenacious collector of plastic arts, his collection is housed in the Egas Moniz House-Museum at Avança (near Aveiro), northern Portugal, and other memorabilia related to this outstanding scientist are located in the Egas Moniz Museum, Lisbon.