João Lobo Antunes

“What worries me is that medicine—enraptured by science, seduced by technology, and stunned by bureaucracy—will erase its humanity and ignore individual suffering,” confesses João Lobo Antunes in Listening with Other Eyes, a collection of his essays published in 2015. “We can invent more and more ways of treating it, but we haven’t yet discovered how to relieve suffering without empathy or compassion,” he writes.

The outpouring of public grief in the wake of his death has shown that Lobo Antunes wasn’t short of either quality. “He took the time to hear people’s stories, and treated everyone the same, regardless of their status. He made everyone feel special,” explains paediatrician and eldest daughter, Margarida. “He was generous and kind, fair and tolerant,” she adds, recalling that when her sister Paula renounced medicine for acting, he supported her decision wholeheartedly.

What worries me is that medicine—enraptured by science, seduced by technology, and stunned by bureaucracy—will erase its humanity and ignore individual suffering

When he qualified with the highest …