Dr. José Tereso is a native of the Torch, was born in the year of the opening of the Hospital Colónia Rovisco Pais, is a doctor, and in the scope of his professional activity he performed functions and various positions in the field of Public Health.

When we asked him to speak about this hospital, he began his report with visible enthusiasm, stating: “all my experience was around the people and actors of that hospital, which was the first employment center for the entire Gandares region.”

From a young age he remembers being “afraid of that disease and knowing that in the various villages around him, including the Torch, there were lepers. We knew that this was the reason why our parents did not allow us to go to certain neighbors. My mother, for example, had a great friend with the disease and was only going to see her on the run from my father, and this was a very liberal man, but I was absolutely prohibited from going to that lady’s house. I am still friends with the son today. It was like that, at that time. We could not enter the hospital either, only employees and authorized persons entered, after passing the reception, as we currently do”. When talking about this, many hospital employees with whom he lived and who lived in the surrounding villages come to mind. And he recalls that “most employees had a job inside and another one outside, like Mr. Constantino, who was a nurse at the hospital and a barber outside.”

Likewise, as a childhood friend of one of the sons of the first director, Dr. Manuel dos Santos Silva and later as his son-in-law, he says: “I got used to hearing about the Rovisco Pais Hospital, about the experiences there, about the successes therapeutic”. He remembers hearing about “the first brigade in 1954, and the outpatient regime, the scientific magazines they edited, the specialized library, the concern for social life in the hospital”.

Regarding the first director of the Hospital Colónia Rovisco Pais, later Inspector of the Institute for Assistance to Lepers, Dr. José Tereso draws the following portrait: “my father-in-law was a great reference among peers, being seen as a great specialist, who besides as full professor at the Faculty of Medicine at the University of Coimbra, he was president of the Regional Section of the Centro da Ordem dos Médicos”.

He also told us how this connection between his father-in-law and leprosy occurred: “he was invited by Professor Bissaya Barreto, of whom he was a disciple and colleague at the Faculty of Medicine and Hospital of the University of Coimbra, to study leprosy, a national priority and in that mission was to meet other leprosaria in the United States of America, Brazil, Cuba, Norway and Africa. ” In the United States of America he managed to obtain “more recent medicines – sulfones”, in quantities that started to arrive more regularly in Portugal “to treat lepromatous leprosy, which was the most prevalent in our country”.

His first office was at the place where his father-in-law was, at his residence. “He was highly esteemed by the population of the region in such a way that, on his return from his first big trip to Brazil, two vans full of people from the Torch moved to the Rocha wharf, Conde de Óbidos in Alcântara – Lisbon, to receive when disembarking the ship.”

Shortly before Dr. José Tereso was married, Dr. Manuel dos Santos Silva became paraplegic. “He was operated on in Neurosurgery at Hospital Sobral Cid but he did not recover. But he was always a great fighter, he lived for several years with this limitation and died in 1985, with my presence, in the building where today is the Regional Health Administration, then HUC’s Orthopedics service headed by Prof. Dr. Norberto Canha, where years later I would work on the conversion of Hospital Rovisco Pais … ”For many years, Dr. José Tereso accompanied him in many of his activities,“ being his driver ”. And it was in this context that he entered the Hospital Rovisco Pais for the first time: “It was on April 27, 1974, in the preventive clinic, that there was a dermatology lecture given by Professor Poiares Batista to the senior students of the Faculty of Medicine, with the presence of of Prof. Dr. Bissaya Barreto. At that time, leprosy was an area given in the chair of dermatology and we still lived under the scientific point of view with many doubts and in dermatology everyone had to know very well what leprosy was”.

He confesses that “over the decades, he has witnessed many misunderstandings regarding that work”. In his opinion “there is no doubt that it was a model leprology hospital, unique in Portugal and one of the best in the world! (said and written by the world summits – eg Raoul Follereau who visited the Hospital Rovisco Pais twice). Look at the modernity that consisted, at the time, of brigades in several counties aimed at bringing medical and social assistance to the populations, giving medicines to the sick, and all in conjunction with all the municipal health delegates of the 318 counties in the country, such as the clinical laboratory, the pharmacy, the imaging, the operating room with a glass wall that guaranteed the brightness if there was an electrical interruption”.

And, he goes on to say: “and the interior of the hospital was a small town where everything existed! Nearby, Preventório and Creche, located in Quinta da Guardiosa welcomed the healthy children of the sick. They had excellent conditions, yet they were separated from their parents … But at the time it was like that, scientifically ”. He admits that this aspect “ended up leaving marks on some victims of the disease and their relatives”, and that is why he understands that “there must be understanding in these cases, towards the traumatized ones”, but he thinks it is incorrect to decontextualize facts, because “those methods of controlling contagion were correct in the light of the science of that time and similar to what was done in the best leprosaria around the world.”