Egas Moniz was the professional name of Antonio Caetano de Abreu Freire, a scientist who made extensive contributions to the study of the human brain. A neurologist at the University of Lisbon, during the 1920s, Moniz developed cerebral angiography--an important breakthrough that is still used today to diagnose tumors and strokes. Moniz also pioneered surgical procedures to address psychiatric disorders; with the help of Almeida Lima, he developed the psychosurgical technique called frontal leucotomy, which severed the frontal lobes from the rest of the brain and reduced the patient's anxiety and other symptoms of neurosis. For his work on the frontal leucotomy, Moniz shared the 1949 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine with Walter Rudolf Hess.
Moniz was born Antonio Caetano de Abreu Freire in Avança, Portugal, on November 29, 1874. A member of an aristocratic family, his father was Fernando de Pina Rezende Abreu and his mother was Maria do Rosario de Almeida e Sousa. Moniz received his early education from an uncle who was an abbot, and in 1891, he entered the University of Coimbra where he studied medicine. Graduating as an M.D. in 1899 with a thesis on diphtheria, Moniz chose neurology as his field of specialization. Although he began to suffer from gout, a disease that impaired the use of his hands, Moniz went on to study in France at the University of Paris and the University of Bordeaux. After writing a paper on the physiological pathology of sexual activity, he became a professor at the University of Coimbra in 1902, the same year he married. In 1911, Moniz was appointed professor of neurology at the University of Lisbon, where he would remain until his retirement in 1945.
Along with his medical career, Egas became immersed in Portuguese politics. In his years as a student at Coimbra, he had authored political literature promoting the cause of the liberal republicans that opposed Portugal's monarchical government. He first used the name Egas Moniz in writing these pamphlets, eventually adopting this moniker for all of his professional and political activities. Beginning in 1899, he served as a deputy in the Portuguese parliament. After the monarchy was overthrown in Portugal in 1910, Moniz became involved in rebuilding and reshaping his country's political system. In 1917, he was named Ambassador to Spain and Minister of Foreign Affairs, and he signed the Versailles Treaty as Portugal's delegate to the peace conference at the end of World War I. A political quarrel got him entangled in a duel in 1919, however, and he finally abandoned his political activities as a liberal republican when a conservative government took power in 1922.
Moniz studied head injuries during World War I, and in 1917 he published A Neurología na Guerra, in which he described some of his findings. One of the early obstacles for neurology was the absence of a reliable and safe technology for examining the living brain. Attempting to find an improved method of locating intracranial brain tumors, Moniz to begin experimenting on corpses by injecting radioactive solutions into the arteries and taking X rays of them. By 1927 he had developed this technique, known as cerebral angiography, to the point where the radioactive solution coursing through the brain's vessels and arteries made it possible to x-ray live brain tissues. Moniz mapped out the distribution of blood vessels in the head, and he was therefore able to detect and measure tumors that displaced the normal location of the arteries. To this day, angiography continues to be the most widely used method for diagnosing tumors, strokes, and other injuries.
The contribution Moniz made to psychosurgery was the result of his determination to find physical cures for mental illness. Attending the 1935 International Neurological Conference in London, Moniz was particularly impressed by the work of John F. Fulton and Carlyle G. Jacobsen, American scientists who had removed the frontal lobes from the brains of chimpanzees and observed certain behavioral changes. Known as frontal leucotomy, the procedure consists of severing the nerves connecting the frontal lobes to the rest of the brain. Moniz and his colleague Almeida Lima developed the technique so it could be applied to humans to alleviate certain psychiatric problems such as anxiety and neurosis. The procedure was considered successful; there were no fatalities in the original twenty patients, and the mental condition of most of them was declared improved or cured by the operation. Widely hailed as the most important psychiatric procedure yet discovered, Moniz shared the Nobel Prize in 1949 for his frontal leucotomy research. This method was abandoned after World War II, however, when psychopharmacology made considerable inroads in treating nervous and mental disorders with drugs. Nonetheless, frontal leucotomy played an important role in educating neurologists about the human brain and the surgical procedures that can be applied to it.
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