Câmara Pestana (Dr Luís da)

He was born in Funchal on 28 October 1863, in the street that now bears his name, in the part of it that belongs to the parish (freguesia) of the Sé. He was the son of Jacinto Augusto Pestana, former chief officer of the department of the secretariat of the civil government of this district, and of Dona Helena Ana da Câmara Pestana, who belonged to an old and distinguished Madeiran family.

He attended the lyceum (state secondary school) of this city and, after completing his preparatory studies at the Polytechnic School, enrolled in 1884 at the Medical-Surgical School of Lisbon, which he was later to honour so greatly as one of its most eminent professors.

A talented and most diligent student, he enjoyed the highest regard of professors and fellow students alike. Through his extreme kindness and remarkable qualities of character, he gathered around his name a true aura of esteem and affection, which time only increased, until it reached the proportions of genuine adoration.

The thesis he chose to defend at the end of his medical course was entitled O microbio do carcinoma. This study already revealed his inclination towards laboratory work, in which he was later to distinguish himself so notably.

Having completed his studies on 24 July 1889, he at once began various investigations in the speciality to which he later devoted himself entirely, and which remained, to the end of his life, the most absorbing aspiration of his mind.

Shortly afterwards, when the great parliamentarian António Cândido was Minister of the Kingdom (reino, i.e. mainland Portugal), the government decided to send a physician abroad to study the much-vaunted results of Robert Koch’s tuberculin, which had even been called the greatest discovery of recent centuries. Let us see what a newspaper of the time said on the matter: ‘Here, the excitement had spread with an intensity proportional to the large number of consumptives who loom so large in our pathology; and so great and so intense was the stir that it reached even the highest spheres of the state, as a rule indifferent to these petty matters of life or death. It must be said that the emotion of so many people condemned to death could not have found a better conductor to those high spheres than the artistic spirit of the then Minister of the Kingdom. António Cândido was the very negation of the politician, the finest praise that can be given to anyone who has ever taken part in our politics. It had been decided to send someone to Paris or Berlin to establish what was positive in the announced marvel. On the appointment, António Cândido consulted two men eminent for their standing in our medical world and for their worthy and respected characters, Professors Sousa Martins and Ferraz de Macedo. Only one name was put forward: that of Pestana. And despite the friction that arose, in January 1891 Pestana left for Paris, charged with studying bacteriology wherever and however he wished, and with establishing what was known of Robert Koch’s alleged discovery.

In Paris, Pestana hardly left the laboratories and hospitals. In the mornings he followed Potain’s clinic, then moved on to Cornil’s laboratory, where he attended Chantemesse’s course in bacteriology. When this course ended, he went to the Pasteur Institute, where he learned the methods of anti-rabies inoculation from the great master, completing his training in the laboratory of Strauss, where he began his work on tetanus toxins’.

Such was the importance of this work that on 27 June 1891 Professor Strauss, of the Paris faculty of medicine, presented Pestana at a session of the Society of Biology, where he delivered his paper, which was unanimously applauded and praised. It remains to be said that, although the Portuguese government subsidised him for only 4 months, Pestana stayed on in Paris, completing at his own expense and personal sacrifice the studies he considered indispensable for his professional training.

On returning from his mission abroad, Câmara Pestana thought only of devoting himself entirely to the work for which he had a decided vocation. From the outset he conceived the idea of bringing his country, albeit on a modest scale, into the extensive research being carried out everywhere in the new science of bacteriology. In Portugal this research was known only through foreign treatises and journals, and no laboratory work of any note had yet been done here.

He had talent, aptitude and an enthusiasm bordering on fanaticism in abundance, enough to devote himself to serious bacteriological research and draw the most fruitful results from it. Alone and without any official support, however, he could not even begin small experiments, which still required various instruments, microscopes, incubators, etc., without which no attempt could possibly succeed.

It was the Lisbon Medical-Surgical School (Escola Médico-Cirúrgica de Lisboa), aware of Dr Câmara Pestana’s rare merits and specialist knowledge, that persuaded the government to appoint him bacteriology demonstrator at the School. This came only after various official bodies had raised the greatest difficulties, which were finally overcome by the tenacity of the teaching staff of that institution of higher education.

The means given to Câmara Pestana and the instruments at his disposal were inadequate for the important research to which he wished to devote himself. Yet his iron will and his intense, persevering work meant that in a single year six inaugural theses inspired by him were prepared, in addition to other notable original work of his own.

To close the year of his research and analyses at the Medical School, Câmara Pestana gave a lecture at the Society of Medical Sciences (Sociedade das Ciências Médicas) reporting on his work, particularly on tetanus, which he had begun in Paris and continued in Lisbon.

That lecture, a fine study in general pathology, brings to the fore the creation of a new therapeutic method, allowing the cure of diseases which, like tetanus, are caused by poisoning of the organism by the products of microbes. Pestana turned this dreamed-of fantasy into reality, presenting at his lecture a rabbit that withstood the most violent inoculations of the tetanus bacillus.

The Bacteriological Institute was about to be created in Lisbon, where our illustrious fellow countryman achieved his greatest triumphs and succeeded in inscribing his name in letters of gold in the annals of medical science.

We shall draw on what a journal of the time published on the matter, which relates with complete fidelity the circumstances of the institute’s foundation.

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The happiest day of Pestana’s life was drawing near; destiny was about to give him a complete laboratory, where he could live for his microbes and his work. He owed it to the waters of Lisbon and to the initiative, irreproachable in this respect, of Mr José Dias Ferreira. The alarm caused in Lisbon by reports that the water was contaminated with virulent agents, the sudden rise in cases of typhoid fever in Lisbon and its surroundings, and the urging of the public health board and the press led the Minister of the Kingdom (reino, i.e. mainland Portugal) to conclude that a rigorous scientific examination of Lisbon’s water was indispensable.

The analyst was self-evident; the minister already knew him from the petition he had read, and the medical public named him without dissent.

By a ministerial order (portaria) of 21 October 1892, Pestana was charged with analysing the water in Lisbon. There was nothing that could serve for this research: no assistants, no premises, no apparatus, no materials. In 15 days everything was ready. The laboratory was improvised in a building of the Hospital de São José (St Joseph), adjoining the old ward of Santo Onofre and rapidly adapted to its new purpose. The apparatus ordered from abroad at great speed arrived in successive consignments; the last, of course, were those that had come through official channels, and the first those ordered by private individuals. The assistant was chosen by Pestana, who knew him from his work at the Medical School: Mr Aníbal Bettencourt, a Pestana of sorts, a gifted microbe-maniac, as modest and disinterested as his director. To say that in all these installations Pestana, who had carte blanche for expenses, confined himself to what was strictly indispensable would be to suppose that the joy of owning a laboratory could cloud his generous faculties and lead him to act otherwise.’

The Bacteriological Institute of Lisbon was created by decree of 29 December 1892, and our illustrious fellow countryman Dr Luís da Câmara Pestana was appointed its director. He devoted his laborious life entirely to the progress and good name of that scientific establishment. The work done there was soon highly praised abroad, and the eminent physician gained standing as one of the most distinguished practitioners of bacteriology. His research and laboratory work were always the chief preoccupation of his mind, so much so that in him it became true fanaticism, of which he gave the most eloquent proof until a few moments before he lost his life.

On this research and work, much of it of great scientific value, he published various articles and papers in Medicina Contemporânea, the Revista de Medicina e Cirurgia, the Archivo de Medicina and other journals, which earned him the highest praise. Among them we single out Etiologia da febre typhoide, Considerações sobre o diagnostico da diphtheria and Sorotherapia da diphtheria.

In collaboration with Dr Aníbal Bettencourt he wrote Contribuição para o estudo bacteriologico da epidemia de Lisboa and Tratamento da raiva em Portugal pelo systema Pasteur, in the Revista de Medicina e Cirurgia; Duas pequenas epidemias de febre typhoide, in the same journal; and various works in German on the Lisbon epidemic of 1894, the leprosy bacillus, etc., as well as, in Portuguese, the report on the bacteriological analysis of Lisbon’s drinking water. He also published as separate pamphlets his inaugural and competition dissertations at the Lisbon Medical School and a study on tetanus.

His work earned him a great reputation abroad. He was elected a member of important scientific societies and was honoured with the particular esteem and regard of several foreign scholars, who referred to him in the most laudatory terms in various writings. The name he had won in the annals of science through his studies and persevering work naturally marked him out for university teaching, and he entered the competitive examination for the post left vacant at the Lisbon Medical School by the death of the eminent professor Sousa Martins. This examination, which was a brilliant one, amply confirmed the fame that preceded him; he presented as his thesis a remarkable study entitled Sorotherapia, and was then appointed substitute professor (lente substituto) of the School by decree of 12 May 1898. There he taught the chairs of pathological anatomy and forensic medicine with great proficiency, and his death deprived this institution of higher education of one of its most distinguished professors.

Dr Luís da Câmara Pestana was a physician at the Hospital de São José, where he rendered excellent service. On 17 December 1899 he began to serve there on an interim basis as duty surgeon, and he was appointed to the post permanently, by competitive examination, on 4 December 1890; in May 1895 he moved to the staff of supernumerary surgeons of the same hospital.

Besides his scientific mission abroad, to which we have already referred, he carried out various public service assignments. The last of these was to go to Porto to study, with the director of the municipal station and some foreign physicians, the value of sera against plague. It was in that city, while devoting himself to these studies, that he contracted the germ of the fatal disease.

It was after his return to Lisbon from his journey to Porto that the symptoms of the terrible disease appeared. The efforts of science and of his devoted colleagues and friends were powerless to overcome it, and he died at the Hospital de Arroios, where he had been isolated, on 15 November 1899, at about midday. He had been killed by his love of science and his devotion to humanity.

The tragic circumstances of his premature death, which echoed mournfully throughout the country and caused the deepest emotion, are still too fresh in everyone’s memory for us to attempt to describe them now, as we set down the principal biographical notes on our ill-fated fellow countryman, former schoolfellow and friend.

This was done, eloquently and movingly, in words reproduced by all the newspapers of the day, by his devoted friend and fellow worker Dr Belo de Morais. Becoming the ‘panegyrist of death’, he drew heartfelt tears from those who read those stirring pages, filled with the most vivid and striking reality.

The expressions of grief were extraordinary everywhere, and many official bodies and countless private individuals joined in them, from the humblest citizen to the supreme head of the State.

A few moments after Câmara Pestana’s death, Carlos I wrote the following letter to the then President of the Council of Ministers: ‘My dear José Luciano. I have this very moment learnt the most sad news of Pestana’s death. It is my wish that, as soon as the chambers meet, my government should present to the Cortes (Portuguese parliament) a bill granting a pension to the mother and daughter of the learned professor Pestana, glorious victim of his arduous duty.

And I wish it to be so, because it is for the Nation to pay homage to the memory of one who, in life, did it so much honour. Your true friend, THE KING’.

Among the tributes paid to the memory of the illustrious physician was the naming of the Lisbon Bacteriological Institute, by decree of 10 August 1902, as the ‘Real Instituto Bacteriológico Câmara Pestana’.

Here in Madeira, the memory of this distinguished man of science is happily perpetuated in the ‘Manicómio Câmara Pestana’ (Câmara Pestana Asylum), whose foundation is due to the initiative and diligent efforts of various gentlemen of this city, who wished the name of the illustrious Madeiran to be inseparably linked with the existence of that hospital (see Manicómio Câmara Pestana). In the garden, in front of the building, stands a bronze bust of Câmara Pestana on a marble column; he gave his name to that mental hospital. The Municipal Council of Funchal renamed the street containing the house where he was born from Pretas to Câmara Pestana.

A marble plaque was placed on this house, bearing the following inscription recording the fact: House where the eminent Portuguese bacteriologist Dr Luís da Câmara Pestana was born on 28 October 1863 (XXVIII October MDCCCLXIII); he died in Lisbon on 15 November 1899 (the XV day of November MDCCCXCIX), a victim of the bubonic plague that infested the city of Porto, to whose study he devoted himself with the greatest self-sacrifice and humanitarian altruism. Tribute of the medical profession of Madeira. 1913.

The unveiling of this plaque, a particularly splendid occasion, took place on 15 November 1913, the fourteenth anniversary of Câmara Pestana’s death. It was the Madeiran physicians who took the initiative for this tribute to their distinguished colleague and illustrious, ill-fated fellow countryman.

It is the only inscribed stone plaque in the streets of this city.