News from Portugal

The Portuguese radio and TV station, RTP, is running a poll to find the greatest ever Portuguese. In January there will be a programme featuring the ninety people who collected the most votes and the ten finalists will be announced - each will have their own documentary. Egas Moniz is of course amongst those nominated. A Portuguese doctor defends Moniz's Nobel Prize on the RTP website; whilst acknowledging that leucotomy could be damaging he points out that Nobel Prizes are awarded not for therapeutics but for the advancement of knowledge. Nobel Prizes for medicine and physiology are indeed usually won in the laboratory - neither of this year's winners (Andrew Z Fire and Craig C Mello) are doctors of medicine. They are awarded for discoveries and Moniz's prize was awarded for "the discovery of the therapeutic value of leucotomy" and so the therapeutic value, or lack of it, is relevant. And how exactly, in any case, was leucotomy supposed to have advanced our knowledge of either the frontal lobes or mental illness?
Another Portuguese website, Portuguese lives, has an interesting biography of Egas Moniz with quite a few illustrations. The author, João Sodré, says that Egas Moniz is not held in high regard by the people of Portugal; the friends, taxi drivers, bartenders, coffee-drinkers and passers-by he spoke to all expressed a negative opinion of the Nobel Prize winner (let's hope they have been voting). Sodré criticises Portuguese psychiatrists for defending leucotomy as a more humane treatment than ECT and wonders how far leucotomy would have got if its inventor had followed Bazett-Haldane principles of not subjecting others to medical experimentation that you wouldn't want to be subjected to yourself. Finally he tackles a popular myth about Egas Moniz - that he was murdered by a patient. He was injured but survived. It was another well-known Portuguese psychiatrist, Miguel Bombarda, who was killed by a patient.