[MEDICINE IN THE LITERARY WORK OF MIGUEL TORCA]

Miguel Torga (Sao Martinho de Anta 1907 - Coimbra 1995) was one of the most important portuguese writers of the twentieth century. There is such identity between his medical and literary activity that he used to say that "his own hand not only writes but also prescribes". Reading his work, mainly autobiographical, allows us to analyze their vision of medicine, the patient physician relationship and how a doctor lives his own disease. In the first case medicine constitute an essential tool to help nature and, therefore, an instrument that makes hope possible. In the second case indicates that in the patient physician relationship are present sadness, stress, anxiety and a supreme exercise of the human condition which is the anamnesis when the patients open their intimity to the doctor. In the third case Torga's work illustrates how a physician can live his own illness as an advantage, as a judicial sentence or as a possibility. Approaching to the medicine under perspective of Miguel Torga, doctor and writer, will help us to understand medicine in a more human context in which the life of the doctor is not stranger to their patients, or to the nature and the concrete world that both share.