GRANDE SERTÃO: Pernambuco 753: A vida de Aloysio Resende Neves, médico, cientista e mineiro (Os Filhos de Fausto) (Portuguese Edition)
Sale price
$27.99
Regular price $33.99
Skip to product information
GRANDE SERTÃO: Pernambuco 753: A vida de Aloysio Resende Neves, médico, cientista e mineiro (Os Filhos de Fausto) (Portuguese Edition)
Sale price
$27.99
Regular price $33.99
PORTUGUESE EDITION Also available in English as Waiting for the Systole
The hidden origin story of the contraceptive pill — and the man history forgot.
In 1941, a young Brazilian physician discovered the scientific principle that would liberate a billion women. To bypass the censors of a dictatorship and the fierce persecution of the Catholic Church, he disguised his findings in a medical journal, meticulously substituting key anatomical words. The censor let it through. The world ignored it.
Eighteen years later, the contraceptive pill reached the American market — backed by Margaret Sanger, tested in Puerto Rico, patented by American laboratories. The credit, and the profits, went elsewhere. Dr. Aloysio Resende Neves remained in Belo Horizonte, armed with his 1941 indexed proof, waging a solitary battle against scientific appropriation: writing letters to presidents, ambassadors, and patent offices for the next four decades. The law acknowledged his priority. It offered him nothing.
Waiting for the Systole is a memoir written by his grandson — a physician who, during a year-long medical internship in his grandfather's home, slept beside the library where a lifetime of ignored discovery was kept. It is also the story of a surgeon who once held a fifteen-year-old girl's beating heart outside her body and waited — with absolute stillness — for the exact moment of the systole to remove the sewing needle buried inside it. He always knew how to wait for the right moment. The patent never came.
From the stone cities of Minas Gerais to the corridors of Columbia University, from the operating table where he saved his cousin Tancredo Neves to the quiet evenings watching cartoons and laughing with his whole body — this is a portrait of a man who changed the world and walked, unbroken, through the silence that settled over his name. And of the woman — Helena — who kept the house running while he kept the discovery alive.
The true, hidden history of the birth control pill. A story of science, silence, and sixty years of waiting.
Written by Lucas Neves M.D., physician, university professor, and grandson of the man who discovered the principle of the pill.
The hidden origin story of the contraceptive pill — and the man history forgot.
In 1941, a young Brazilian physician discovered the scientific principle that would liberate a billion women. To bypass the censors of a dictatorship and the fierce persecution of the Catholic Church, he disguised his findings in a medical journal, meticulously substituting key anatomical words. The censor let it through. The world ignored it.
Eighteen years later, the contraceptive pill reached the American market — backed by Margaret Sanger, tested in Puerto Rico, patented by American laboratories. The credit, and the profits, went elsewhere. Dr. Aloysio Resende Neves remained in Belo Horizonte, armed with his 1941 indexed proof, waging a solitary battle against scientific appropriation: writing letters to presidents, ambassadors, and patent offices for the next four decades. The law acknowledged his priority. It offered him nothing.
Waiting for the Systole is a memoir written by his grandson — a physician who, during a year-long medical internship in his grandfather's home, slept beside the library where a lifetime of ignored discovery was kept. It is also the story of a surgeon who once held a fifteen-year-old girl's beating heart outside her body and waited — with absolute stillness — for the exact moment of the systole to remove the sewing needle buried inside it. He always knew how to wait for the right moment. The patent never came.
From the stone cities of Minas Gerais to the corridors of Columbia University, from the operating table where he saved his cousin Tancredo Neves to the quiet evenings watching cartoons and laughing with his whole body — this is a portrait of a man who changed the world and walked, unbroken, through the silence that settled over his name. And of the woman — Helena — who kept the house running while he kept the discovery alive.
The true, hidden history of the birth control pill. A story of science, silence, and sixty years of waiting.
Written by Lucas Neves M.D., physician, university professor, and grandson of the man who discovered the principle of the pill.