ABSTRACT
This chapter talks about the ethics of diagnosis in the Portuguese physician-writer Julio Dinis. Dinis's four novels avoid naming disease and they consistently satirise the diagnostic encounter. Instead, illness is represented as an interior, affective malady, curable by self-discipline or change of environment. It is little wonder that Dinis's writing appealed to another Portuguese physician interested in psychology, the neurologist and 1949 Nobel Laureate Egas Moniz. The chapter describes Moniz is often a sensitive and perceptive reader of Dinis's work; he seems to have overlooked the older writer's arguments for medical restraint. Like Dinis, Egas Moniz was fascinated with the workings of the brain he pioneered cerebral angiography but he has become controversial for his association with the lobotomy. The chapter describes the contrast of two Portuguese physician-writers, one skeptical of medical labeling and extreme treatments and the other notorious for an ill-conceived and crude surgical procedure.
