Egas Moniz

Egas Moniz invented cerebral angiography, devised the lobotomy, and received the Nobel Prize in 1949 for the second of those, which is among the most contested awards in the history of the prize. He was a professor of neurology at Lisbon and also a politician - a deputy, ambassador to Spain, and foreign minister of Portugal at the Paris peace conference in 1919, where he signed the treaty on his country's behalf. His angiography, developed from 1927, injected radio-opaque contrast into the carotid artery so that the vessels of the brain could be seen on a plate; it was the first way of locating a tumour in a living head and it is the ancestor of every vascular imaging technique since. The leucotomy came in 1935. He had heard a report at a London congress of two chimpanzees whose frontal lobes had been removed and which had become placid, and within months he was operating on psychiatric patients, first by injecting alcohol into the frontal white matter and then by cutting cores out of it with an instrument he designed. He reported twenty cases with no deaths and claimed about a third recovered, on follow-up that was days long in some cases. Walter Freeman took it up in America and performed thousands. Moniz himself was crippled by gout and used a wheelchair, and was shot and permanently injured in 1939 by a patient at his own clinic. Families of lobotomy patients have petitioned repeatedly for the prize to be rescinded; the Nobel Foundation does not revoke awards. Portugal put him on a banknote and a stamp. He wrote on sexology early in his career under a pseudonym. Angiography alone would have been a substantial claim on the prize.

MyHistorian
A causal knowledge graph of history