Manuel de Abreu

Manuel de Abreu was a Brazilian physician and scientist, the inventor of abreugraphy, a rapid radiography of the lungs for screening tuberculosis. He was born in São Paulo, in 1894, and graduated in medicine at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro in 1914. He then traveled to France, where he worked as a radiologist and developed new methods and devices for radiography. He became interested in fluorography, or the photographic recording of fluoroscopic x-ray images of the lungs, and realized its potential for diagnosing tuberculosis and other pulmonary diseases. He published his first work on the radiological interpretation of pulmonary lesions in pleuropulmonary tuberculosis in 1921, and was invited to join the prestigious Académie de Médicine de Paris. In 1922, he returned to Brazil and became the head of the X-Ray Department at the Federal public health service for the prophylaxis of tuberculosis in Rio de Janeiro. He continued his research on thoracic radiography and invented a new process for obtaining radiographs of the chest, which he called roentgenfotografia, in 1936. This process was later named abreugraphy, after him, and was widely used for screening and diagnosing tuberculosis. He also wrote several books and articles on radiology, tuberculosis, and public health. He was a member of the Brazilian Academy of Letters and the Historical and Geographic Institute. He was awarded the Medal of Honor of the American College of Chest Physicians in 1950, and was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Physiology and Medicine in 1946. He died in 1962, at the age of 68, in Rio de Janeiro. He is considered one of the most important and influential Brazilian physicians and scientists, and one of the main contributors to the fight against tuberculosis.