The Two Portuguese Nobel Winners

José Saramago

The Nobel Prize in Literature 1998

“who with parables sustained by imagination, compassion and irony continually enables us once again to apprehend an elusory reality”

The following excerpts were taken from Saramago’ s Nobel Lecture and shows what materials Saramago is made of, and what he has become little by little:

At the time I thought, though my grandmother was also a very wise woman, she couldn’t rise to the heights grandfather could, a man who, lying under a fig tree, having at his side José his grandson, could set the universe in motion just with a couple of words.
(..)
There could have been no other reason why, sitting one evening at the door of her cottage where she now lived alone, staring at the biggest and smallest stars overhead, she said these words: “The world is so beautiful and it is such a pity that I have to die”. She didn’t say she was afraid of dying, but that it was a pity to die, as if her hard life of unrelenting work was, in that almost final moment, receiving the grace of a supreme and last farewell, the consolation of beauty revealed. She was sitting at the door of a house like none other I can imagine in all the world, because in it lived people who could sleep with piglets as if they were their own children, people who were sorry to leave life just because the world was beautiful;

I was finally aware I was transforming the ordinary people they were into literary characters: this was, probably, my way of not forgetting them, drawing and redrawing their faces with the pencil that ever changes memory, colouring and illuminating the monotony of a dull and horizonless daily routine as if creating, over the unstable map of memory, the supernatural unreality of the country where one has decided to spend one’s life.

I wrote these words almost thirty years ago, having no other purpose than to rebuild and register instants of the lives of those people who engendered and were closest to my being, thinking that nothing else would need explaining for people to know where I came from and what materials the person I am was made of, and what I have become little by little.

But after all I was wrong, biology doesn’t determine everything and as for genetics, very mysterious must have been its paths to make its voyages so long… My genealogical tree (you will forgive the presumption of naming it this way, being so diminished in the substance of its sap) lacked not only some of those branches that time and life’s successive encounters cause to burst from the main stem but also someone to help its roots penetrate the deepest subterranean layers, someone who could verify the consistency and flavour of its fruit, someone to extend and strengthen its top to make of it a shelter for birds of passage and a support for nests. When painting my parents and grandparents with the paints of literature, transforming them from common people of flesh and blood into characters, newly and in different ways builders of my life, I was, without noticing, tracing the path by which the characters I would invent later on, the others, truly literary, would construct and bring to me the materials and the tools which, at last, for better or for worse, in the sufficient and in the insufficient, in profit and loss, in all that is scarce but also in what is too much, would make of me the person whom I nowadays recognise as myself: the creator of those characters but at the same time their own creation.
(…)
What other lessons could I possibly receive from a Portuguese who lived in the sixteenth century, who composed the Rimas and the glories, the shipwrecks and the national disenchantments in the Lusíadas, who was an absolute poetical genius, the greatest in our literature (..)
(…)
No lesson would fit me, no lesson could I learn, except the simplest, which could have been offered to me by Luís Vaz de Camões in his pure humanity, for instance the proud humility of an author who goes knocking at every door looking for someone willing to publish the book he has written, thereby suffering the scorn of the ignoramuses of blood and race, the disdainful indifference of a king and of his powerful entourage, the mockery with which the world has always received the visits of poets, visionaries and fools.

At least once in life, every author has been, or will have to be, Luís de Camões, even if they haven’t written the poem Sôbolos Rios…

What will you do with this book? It was also proud humility to carry under his arm a masterpiece and to be unfairly rejected by the world. Proud humility also, and obstinate too – wanting to know what the purpose will be, tomorrow, of the books we are writing today, and immediately doubting whether they will last a long time (how long?) the reassuring reasons we are given or that are given us by ourselves. No-one is better deceived than when he allows others to deceive him.

I conclude. The voice that read these pages wished to be the echo of the conjoined voices of my characters. I don’t have, as it were, more voice than the voices they had. Forgive me if what has seemed little to you, to me is all.-  ©THE NOBEL FOUNDATION 1998

Egas Moniz

The Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine 1949

“for his discovery of the therapeutic value of leucotomy in certain psychoses”

In order to better understand his contributions to Science, read bellow an excerpt taken from http://cvc.instituto-camoes.pt/ciencia_eng/p12.html

His two most important discoveries were cerebral angiography, which he achieved in 1927 and prefrontal leucotomy, in 1935. The former was awarded the Oslo Prize in 1945 and the latter the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1949.

In order to be able to do a cerebral angiograph, Egas Moniz carried out many experiments, in an attempt to find substances that could be injected into the arteries of the brain so as to make brain vessels visible in x-rays. The opaqueness brought about by the injection of these products provided a contrast, making it possible to detect brain tumours, thus facilitating their treatment. On 28 June 1927, Egas Moniz obtained the first arteriograph of the live human body. This feat brought him great international prestige and became very important in the dissemination of his subsequent research work in the field of psychosurgery.

After this research work, Egas Moniz dedicated himself to another project for the treatment of some mental diseases that were one of the most pressing targets of neurological medicine at the time, before the development of pharmacology and psychotropics. It was thought that is was possible to treat some diseases via physical means by cutting the neurons’ interconnecting fibres. The treatment would be done on the prefrontal lobes.

Leucotomy was later transformed and developed by the American Walter Freeman, whose method became known as lobotomy. These methods gave rise to much controversy, particularly from the fifties onwards, when alternatives to the treatment of schizophrenia via prescription drugs started coming out. The negative image of the lobotomy and its very often abusive identification with leucotomy is closely related to Freeman’s methodology. Freeman carried out a true lobotomisation “campaign” in the United States, where he performed more than 3500 operations, being imitated by many other psychosurgeons in several countries. Although the leucotomy and lobotomy methods have been practically abandoned nowadays, the controversy continues.