José Manuel Silva
President of the Portuguese Medical Association
In 2007, through the hands of doctors Ferreira de Carvalho and José Carlos Marinho, I had the wonderful opportunity to meet Dr. Hermes Castanhas. What, at first, was simple curiosity, quickly turned into deep surprise and uncontainable astonishment.
The title of this preface was the one that headed the article that Dr. Ferreira de Carvalho published in the Bulletin of the Regional Section of the Center of the Order of Physicians, in the September/October 2007 issue.
Without a doubt, the rarest treasure was Dr. Hermes Castanhas himself. For his life trajectory, eclectic personality, ethical practice of medicine, astonishing memory, dazzling vivacity and fabulous collection of rare medical treasures.
Someone you look at with a hint of healthy envy and think you would also like to have been like that and to one day still be so intellectually well preserved.
The admiration begins as soon as we enter the gardens of this house with Portuguese colonial design from the end of the 19th century. It’s like going back in history and beginning to enter an almost unreal world from our grandparents’ books.
But the biggest secrets are kept safe in the attic. A typical attic from our dreams, where at every step we stop to consider every detail and discover a new treasure, a new wonder, a new story.
Dr. Hermes accompanies us on that magical journey through the past and explains the meaning, function and origin of each piece in his collection. A prodigious memoir that describes all the details of this admirable compilation of historical jewels of medical art!
It all started with a “doctor’s stamp”, like those found in public offices, like a white seal. It was like a virus that took hold and never went to sleep. From then on, the collecting fever never left Dr. Hermes Castanhas. He fondly states that he inherited the conservative spirit from his grandfather, Prof. David Francisco de Oliveira. One by one, he built a rare collection of hundreds of medical items, some rescued from rubbish dumps, others forgotten as invalid, and a few acquired for small fortunes.
Some of the pieces are the object of special affection, such as the Lerebour microscope from 1845, transported to an exhibition in Brazil and which led an astonished German colleague to ask: “tell me how much, tell me how much and I’ll write the check”. Or even a syringe with a micrometric screw that was used to perform lymphograms on patients with elephantiasis by Prof. António Martins, surgeon at the Hospital do Ultramar, and which was found in a locksmith’s shop in Lisbon, passing through one of the first X-ray ampoules that came to Portugal. Smiles are inevitable when faced with a set of irrigators from the beginning of the last century, with the strangest shapes, one of which, in porcelain, “offered” the patient, as soon as he began his presentation, the pleasure of listening to “Le Petit Duc”, the “Boccace Waltz” or another musical excerpt!
Several authentically carved wooden Pinards and so many, so many other hundreds of obstetric pieces – the most privileged – general surgery, orthopedics, stomatology and other specialties that it is worth delighting yourself for hours on end trying to discover what will surprise us the most. Dr. Hermes Castanhas is another excellent example of Abel Salazar’s aphorism, “The doctor who only knows about medicine, doesn’t even know about medicine”, dedicating himself heart, soul and wallet to the History of theoretical and practical Medicine. His life trajectory honors the History of Medicine and Portuguese doctors.
Born in 1932, in Vilarinho do Bairro, Anadia, he retired in 2002 from the Aveiro District Hospital, where he was Director of the Obstetrics/Gynecology Service. He was eternally passionate about practicing his medical specialty and still cherishes the dream of keeping alive hundreds of pieces from the History of Portuguese Medicine, many of which have already been exhibited at various exhibitions: Porto, Coimbra, Algarve, Torre de Belém, Fundação Calouste Gulbenkian, National Congress of Medicine of the Order of Physicians, Rio de Janeiro. In September 1989, during the E.A.G.O. Congress. (European Association of Gynecology/Obstetrics), held in Krakow, Poland, in view of the material wealth and the immeasurable knowledge of the collector, he was appointed President of the History of Medicine of this Society.
This catalogue, which I have the honour of prefacing, presents only some of the pieces in the collection. It whets your appetite for the rest. The real treat would be a visit to the Dr. Hermes House Museum, as he himself so affectionately and appropriately named it.
The invitation remains.
One day we will have the Portuguese Medical Association’s Museum of Medical History.
