In this section we will describe all kinds of interesting medical-literary places in Europe. The section has started on June 21, 2025 and will appear every two weeks, alternately with Scoop. Older posts can be found below. Comments, questions, tips, criticism, and praise can be sent to Arko Oderwald: website@litmed.nl
July 19th, 2025
Lisbon: Fernando Pessoa (2)
Location: various locations
Duration: If you follow parts 1 and 2, the day will be almost full.
Here you can download the pdf
- Pessoa’s grave, initially
Location: Cemitério dos Prazeres
Address: Praça São João Bosco 568, 1350-297 Lisbon.
How to get there: Tram 28E, final stop (the famous yellow tram)
Opening hours: 9:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m. (October to April) and until 6:00 p.m. in May to September
Cost: free
After his death, Pessoa was buried at the Cemitério dos Prazeres alongside his family. It is a beautiful cemetery, but it is located close to the airport, so planes fly low overhead constantly.
Upon entering, you will notice the many cats, who apparently have a good life here.
If you walk all the way to the end of the cemetery, you will look out over a valley and, on the left, the large suspension bridge over the Tagus River, the 25 April Bridge.
A Catholic cemetery with many small houses and mausoleums. This creates entire streets of the dead.
The windows are striking, allowing you to look inside.
Next to the church is a room where dissections were performed and, to my surprise, the name of Dr. Sousa Martins, the holy doctor of Lisbon, appears again as one of the users. (see On the spot Lisbon 1)
José Saramago, the Portuguese winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature, has the main character in his novel The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis, an alter ego of Pessoa, the Brazilian doctor Ricardo Reis, visit the grave of his creator in this cemetery.
Saramago describes the visit as follows:
When Ricardo Reis arrived at the cemetery, the bell in the gate rang, clanging with the sound of cracked bronze, like a rural farmhouse in the languid quiet of the siesta. A handcart moved away with swaying funeral curtains, followed by a group of dark figures, women wrapped in black shawls and men in wedding suits, carrying white chrysanthemums in their arms, while whole bouquets of these flowers adorned the bier; even flowers do not all suffer the same fate. The handcart disappeared into the back of the cemetery and Ricardo Reis made his way to the administration office, the register of the dead, to ask where the grave of Fernando António Nogueira Pessoa was, who had died on the thirtieth of the previous month and been buried on the second of the current month, laid to rest in this cemetery until the end of time, when God would awaken the poets from their temporary death. The clerk realizes that he has a cultured, distinguished person in front of him and explains everything diligently, giving him the street and the number, because this is just like a city, sir, and because he gets tangled up in his own directions, he comes out from behind the counter, steps outside and points, now very decisively, to that avenue, all the way down, at the corner turn right and then straight ahead, the grave is on the right about two-thirds of the way down the street, but watch out, because it’s a small stone, you could easily walk right past it.
(….)
Ricardo Reis walked past the grave he was looking for, there was no voice calling him, Psst, here it is, and yet there are still people who stubbornly claim that the dead talk. Woe to those dead if they didn’t have a plaque, a name in stone, a number, just like the doors of the living, just to be able to find them, it was worth learning to read. Imagine an illiterate person, one of the many we have, you should take him there and say, “Here it is.” Perhaps he would look at you suspiciously, wondering if you were trying to fool him, if through your mistake or malice he would end up praying for Montecchio when Capuletto lies there, for Mendes when it is Gonçalves.
The concession certificate, Family tomb of Dona Dionisia de Seabra Pessoa, is carved on the frontispiece, under the protruding eaves of this guardhouse where the sentry, a romantic figure, is sleeping. Below, at the level of the lower hinge of the door, another name, nothing more: Fernando Pessoa, with his date of birth and death, and the gilded curve of an urn that says, I lie here, and Ricardo Reis repeats aloud, not knowing that he has heard it, He lies here, at that moment it starts to rain again. He has come from so far away, from Rio de Janeiro, has sailed many days and nights across the waves of the sea, that journey now seems so close and so far away, and what is he doing here now, at dinner time, in this street, all alone with his umbrella raised between houses of the dead, in the distance the false sound of the bell can be heard, he had expected that when he arrived here and touched that iron gate, he would feel a shock deep in his soul, a tearing, an inner earthquake, large cities collapsing in silence because we are not there, with sagging portals and white towers, and in the end it is only a slight burning sensation in his eyes, so fleeting that he did not even have time to think about it and be moved by the thought.
This fantastic novel in honor of Pessoa shows how deserving Saramago was of the Nobel Prize. Ricardo Reis, Pessoa’s creation, who still sees him occasionally, but increasingly vaguely, is himself doomed now that his creator is no longer there. It is also a novel in which Lisbon plays an important role, at a time when the Second World War is about to break out. The Portuguese dictatorship is dissected in an inimitable way. A beautiful novel.
We will encounter Saramago again in another part of Lisbon.
What is a problem in our time is that Pessoa is no longer here. The family tomb where he once lay is still there, but like the famous Amalia Rodrigues, the fado singer, the famous writer has been reburied in Belém, which is also the last stop on our Pessoa journey.
After a stroll through the cemetery, we return to the entrance. Here, by the way, there are toilets if nature calls. One last tip is that Campo Ourique, as the start/end point of the tram, is the perfect place to grab a seat by the open window on a yellow tram and enjoy the entire ride to Praça Martim Moniz, right through Alfama and its steep and winding streets. The ride takes at least 45 minutes.
- Pessoa’s tomb, now
Location: Mosteiro dos Jeronimos
Address: Empire Square · 1400-206 Lisbon
How to get there: tram 15E
Open: Tuesday to Sunday 9:30 a.m. to 5:30 p.m. (last admission at 5:00 p.m.)
Cost: €18. Online booking recommended
From Praça Martim Moniz, it is only a short walk to Praça Figueira. This is where tram 15E starts. Unfortunately, it is not usually a yellow tram, but a modern tram heading towards Belem. The tram follows the banks of the Tagus River. If you are not in a hurry, you can get off at the Cais Rocha stop to visit the Museu Nacional de Arte Antiga. This museum has a magnificent painting by Hieronymus Bosch.
The Temptation of Saint Anthony. There is a somewhat paler copy in Brussels. Definitely worth a visit, but you can also save this for the return trip.
Return to the tram stop. Get off at the final stop in Belem. There are a number of interesting things to see in Belem: a museum of modern art, definitely worth a visit, a botanical garden, a bakery, the only place, according to locals, where you can get authentic pastel de nata, a tower, formerly the departure point of the great Portuguese maritime company, a monument commemorating this
and the building we want to visit, the Mosteiro dos Jeronimos. The few times I’ve been there, there were long queues. It’s a good idea to buy tickets in advance.
Once inside, you are overwhelmed by the rich architecture. The monastery dates from the 16th century, the era of the great discoveries: along the Cape of Good Hope to India (Vasco da Gama), to America (Columbus), Portugal, a small country, flourished and was present all over the world.
And Fernando is buried in that monastery. You could almost say that this monastery is the Pantheon of Portugal, were it not for the limited number of famous people buried there. Moreover, Luis de Camões is only symbolically buried here.
I would have expected that for such a versatile person as Pessoa, who had 81 heteronyms, something less boring, something more modern, could have been thought up. Both in terms of how it looks and in terms of the surroundings. Unlike at Cemitério dos Prazeres, there is no one around to chat with.
I don’t envy Fernando.
July 5th, 2025
Lisbon: Fernando Pessoa (1)
Location: various locations
Duration: If you follow part 1 and part 2, your day will be almost full.
- Café A Brasileira
Address: Graça Plaza
How to get there: Baixa-Chiado metro station, exit Baixa
Close to the square where the most famous Portuguese poet, Luis de Camões, has a statue, Praça Luis Camões, next to the entrance to the metro, is the terrace of Café A Brasileira, a café that opened in 1905. Fernando Pessoa is sitting at a table on the terrace. He is being photographed incessantly by someone who sits down on the chair next to him, but he remains cool.
He sits there like his colleague and contemporary Hemingway in Havana at the bar in El Floridita. Relaxed, with a drink. Because Hemingway and Pessoa also had that in common: their great love of alcohol.
But otherwise, these contemporaries are as different as night and day, leaving it up to you to decide who is day and who is night. A small example is Hemingway’s friendship with a dictator (see the photo in the picture) and Pessoa’s dislike of Salazar, the Portuguese dictator.
Fernando Pessoa (1888–1935) is best known for his heteronyms, the many splintered versions of the writer, each with a different body of work. The best known are Alberto Caeiro, Álvaro de Campos, Bernardo Soares, and Ricardo Reis. For Pessoa, human beings are not one-dimensional, but made up of multiple layers. Freud’s “I am not the master in my own house” is expressed in his heteronymic work. And, funnily enough, heteronyms also wrote comments about each other. His best-known work is The Book of Disquiet. That book was only published after his death, more about that later.
Only a few photos of him are known, such as this blurry one:
Pessoa, perhaps on his way to the terrace of Café A Brasileira. He looks comfortable sitting here on the terrace of the café. His drinking contributed to his early death, as described by Antonio Tabucchi, an Italian Pessoa expert, in The Last Three Days of Fernando Pessoa. It is a short novella, as far as I know not translated into English, in which Pessoa’s most important alter egos come to say goodbye during the last three days of his life. It is described as delirium.
“He lay in a modest room with an iron bed, a white wardrobe, and a small table. Pessoa lay down on the bed, turned on the lamp on the bedside table, rested his head on the pillow, and stroked his right side with his hand. Fortunately, the pain had eased somewhat. The nurse brought him a cup of water and a tablet and said, ‘Excuse me, but I have to give you an injection, doctor’s orders.
Pessoa asked for a dose of laudanum, a sleeping pill he was accustomed to taking when, in his capacity as Bernardo Soares, he was unable to sleep. The nurse brought him what he asked for and Pessoa drank it. “My name is Catarina,” said the nurse. “If you need anything, just call me and I’ll come right away.”
We are still on the terrace, sitting next to Pessoa. But others are eager to take our seats, so we leave Pessoa here on the terrace, because since his death he can be found in several places at once in Lisbon. So we’re on our way, but first we take a look inside what the sign on the facade says is the oldest bookshop in Lisbon, Livraria Bertrand, on R. Garrett, opened in 1732. It is even said to be the oldest bookshop in the world. It is everything a bookshop should be, but almost never is anymore. At the back is a café.
After the bookshop, we walk back a little, turn left into R. Serva Pinto and head for a square on the right with Pessoa’s birthplace, opposite the national theater. In front of that house is another statue of him.
- Pessoa’s birthplace
Address: Largo de Sao Carlos
Cost: Free
In this photo, the statue is not yet visible, but you can see the sign on the wall, just behind the lantern, indicating that Pessoa was born here. Nevertheless, the statue is well worth seeing. The way Pessoa is depicted shows that he was certainly not an open book.
If we compare Pessoa to Hemingway, Hemingway is a straightforward writer, while Pessoa writes in a labyrinthine, searching, ambiguous style. Here’s an example:
(Bernardo Soares) “I wish I were in the country, so that I could wish I were in the city. I love being in the city so much, but that way I would enjoy it twice as much.”
He is a truly remarkable writer, because he also wrote rather boring detective stories and a not very interesting travel guide to Lisbon. Originally written in English (Pessoa also translated books). The travel guide was published long after his death. But who am I to criticize someone who is considered by many to be one of the most important writers of the 20th century?
For the next step in Pessoa’s footsteps, we have to go to the house where he lived. That house is located in the Ourique district. The easiest way to get there is to take the yellow tram 28 to Campo Ourique from Praça Luis Camões. However, this tram is often very crowded, so hopefully you will be able to get on. Get off at Praça de Estrela. Perhaps take a look inside the church, and then walk a short distance.
- Pessoa’s house (now a museum)
Location: Casa Fernando Pessoa
Address: Rua Coelho da Rocha, 16-18 Campo de Ourique
How to get there: Tram: 25 and 28; Bus: 709, 713, 720, 738, and 774
Cost: 5 euros. Tickets also available online.
Opening hours: 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. Closed on Mondays.
Pessoa lived in what is still a normal street with residential houses. His house has been turned into a biographical museum.
The museum naturally houses the famous mysterious box containing 27,543 manuscripts, which was found after his death.
I don’t know if the box in the museum is the real one, I suspect not, but this box plays an important role in the reception of Pessoa. It took until the 1980s before the documents were deciphered. In 1982, the first edition of The Book of Disquiet was published. This was followed by new editions in 1986, 1990, and 1998. New editions of the latest version have been published, each time with further revisions.
This accumulation of changes has to do, on the one hand, with what was found in the box, but on the other hand also with the fact that the texts were in undated envelopes. What is the correct order? And what belongs in the book and what does not? The famous Book of Disquiet has therefore been regularly revised and only became semi-definitive around 2004.
The museum is tastefully decorated and provides a nice overview of Pessoa’s life and work. On the website (which is very slow), you can also take a virtual tour of the museum, but it is much better in person.
After your visit, enjoy a nice cup of espresso at a reasonable price in the café and then move on to the next stage. You can walk back to the tram, or continue on to the Cemitério dos Prazeres. It’s only about two tram stops away, so it’s not too far.
In two weeks, we will continue our Pessoa journey.
Arko Oderwald
Here you can find a pdf.
Older entries
June 21, 2025
Lisbon: Doctor José Tomás de Sousa Martins
Location: Campo dos Mártires da Pátria, Lisbon
How to get there: bus 730.
Cost: free
There are many famous doctors in our history. Some doctors have had diseases named after them. Think of Gilles de la Tourette, Cushing, Alzheimer, Parkinson, Dupuytren. Or doctors associated with a specific medical procedure, such as the Babinski reflex, or a particular symptom, such as Cullen or Trousseau. Oh yes, there are also doctors who have become famous as writers: Chekhov, Maugham, Lobo Antunes, Williams, to name but a few.
There is a (Dutch) wikisage page with famous doctors. It is a colorful and rather random collection of doctors, many of whom fall under the above examples. What is striking is that none of these doctors became famous for their great clinical abilities, including dealing with patients in a decent manner. What we do know is that some doctors were removed from the list precisely because of their lack of the latter. For example, Friedrich Wegener (Wegener’s disease) and Hans Reiter (Reiter’s disease) were removed from the list because of their Nazi sympathies. The diseases were renamed.
But there are famous doctors who are famous for the way they treated their patients. For that, we have to go to Campo dos Mártires da Pátria in Lisbon. There stands the statue of Dr. José Tomás de Sousa Martins.
He lived from 1843 to 1897. He has a Wikipedia page in English. There we read:
He was a doctor and professor at the Medical-Surgical School of Lisbon, the predecessor of the Faculty of Medical Sciences of the NOVA University in Lisbon. He studied pharmacy and medicine and worked in Lisbon, mainly for the poor. He was particularly interested in the fight against tuberculosis. His career and his choice to work mainly for the poor people of Lisbon created an image of a saint, which is still noticeable today.
Tuberculosis, which was untreatable at the time, became his life’s work. He ensured that a sanatorium was built in north-eastern Portugal, the Sanatório Dr. Sousa Martins. Sadly, Sousa Martins himself contracted tuberculosis. It was so severe that he took his own life on August 18, 1897.
And now we are standing in front of his statue, which was erected in 1904.
The statue stands near the medical faculty where he was a professor.
He is, of course, depicted as a philanthropist, seen here on a card with a wish.
However, that is not what repeatedly catches the eye. Around the statue are stones, often made of marble, inscribed with wishes and expressions of gratitude. There are dozens, perhaps even hundreds, of wishes and expressions of gratitude from patients, one on top of the other.
They are ex-votos, a familiar phenomenon in many religions. But that is not the most remarkable thing about them. At the time of writing, this good doctor died 128 years ago… And there are also many expressions of gratitude that are less than a year old. Doctor Sousa Martins has become a saint. On the anniversary of his birth and death, his grave and this statue are visited by hundreds of people, ensuring a permanent supply of ex-votos for eternity. I wonder if anyone keeps them in any kind of order… Apparently not.
As far as I know, Dr. Sousa Martins has not yet made his way into fiction. Perhaps Axel Munthe’s The Doctor of San Michele is the novel that comes closest to the holy doctor. Or dr. Samuel Pozzi, the first gynecologist, described by Julian Barnes in The man in the red coat. And then there is the doctor from a story by Richard Selzer. His fellow villagers consider him a saint, but he is an impostor… Imposter is the name of the story. Doctor Sousa Martins was certainly no impostor, but a saint? That is a bit far-fetched.
Now that you are here, it is worth walking into R. Julio de Andrade, following the road and visiting the Jardim do Torel.
Lisbon has a number of places with beautiful views, called Miradores. The Jardim do Torel is a beautifully landscaped park with views over the lower town.
It’s also a nice place to rest for a while. Leave the park the same way you entered and continue along R. Julio de Andrade. Take the first left and then right and you will arrive at one of Lisbon’s three cable cars, the Elevador do Lavra, which will take you down to the lower town.
