Medicine as craft and service.
Surgery, general practice, emergencies, teaching and a constant defence of humane care.
Sorocaba, Hospital das Clínicas, SAMDU.
Pedro graduated in Medicine in Sorocaba in 1963 and went on to São Paulo for his residency at the Hospital das Clínicas. The archive then records about three years at SAMDU, the Emergency Home Medical Care Service, where the doctor went to the patient's home.
It was a training of emergency rooms and streets, and it shows in his stories: the empty early hours at the Santa Casa, the pharmacy calling the doctor in a hurry, the wounded driver he recognises from an earlier visit.
Surgery and general practice
In the documents of the Clínica Médica Campo Limpo, Pedro appears as a clinician and "surgeon for adults and children". His reminiscences include appendicitis at both extremes of age, abdominal emergencies, wounds and diagnoses that marked his professional memory: a tuberculosis found in someone who only wanted to lose weight, a fractured femur in a 96-year-old gentleman.
Teaching
A clipping describes him as a former professor of Surgical Technique and Abdominal Surgery at Universidade São Francisco, in Bragança Paulista. Two of his best-remembered cases, the youngest and the oldest patients he operated on for appendicitis, took place in Bragança. The vocation to teach reappears in the articles, written to explain Medicine in the language of the neighbourhood.
Public health
Pedro wrote repeatedly about emergency care, outpatient clinics, health plans, doctors' pay, public investment and the organisation of care. More than describing diseases, he was interested in how the system delivered, or failed to deliver, care to people.
An official publication of the Municipality of Osasco, from April 2005, lists him among the city's physicians. The archive also holds texts on care in Osasco, memories of Franco da Rocha and references to Caieiras.
“Sometimes we didn't even need medicine. Your attention and your words alone healed us.”
Message from patients, preserved in the archive
A hug at the door, classical music and coffee.
The tribute written by patients describes the routine: the receptionist would let him know, and Pedro himself came to greet the person with a hug. He saw patients to the sound of classical music, "soft as a breeze". He offered coffee or tea. He listened to each one.
He did not mind the patient's class. "What mattered to him was recovery", the text says. His office, said another record, was "everywhere", with no day and no hour.
Felipe Guedes did not grow up with his father. He knows Pedro through the stories, and loves him for them. What he keeps most is the doctor who treated for free those who could not pay: a way of looking at people, not at money, that Felipe carries with him.