Amélia Cardia dos Santos Costa belongs to the medical record as a figure whose work changed what could be treated.
The record lists Amélia Cardia dos Santos Costa as Portuguese physician, writer and spiritist.
Amélia Cardia dos Santos Costa was born at Lisbon in 1855. Her recorded nationality is Kingdom of Portugal. She trained at Lisbon Medical-Surgical School.
Anaesthesia, antisepsis and germ theory arrived within fifty years and made modern surgery possible for the first time.
Medicine advances against a moving target, and its successes are counted in lives rather than papers.
That the work was done from Kingdom of Portugal matters: hospitals, training and research funding are unevenly distributed, and they decide which questions can be asked.
Amélia Cardia dos Santos Costa died in 1938, aged 83. What survives is the change in practice, which is how a medical life is actually measured.
