His name was João, but everyone knew him as Gomes-Pedro. He was one of the best communicators I knew, a man who spoke with his eyes, who hypnotized us with his words, who made us believe in a world that was worth it, with more of a future than the past, with babies who could be better than their parents, better than us.
I hadn’t seen him for many years, but that was always the image I had of the pediatrician’s pediatrician, a total doctor who was a clinician, researcher, teacher and pedagogue. He died at the end of last Monday, an insurmountable loss that is genuinely simple to explain: the way of receiving and treating sick children changed in Portugal due to his influence.
Before there was only the child and the illness, then everyone else came to exist, the parents, grandparents, siblings, educators, teachers and friends. She understood, before anyone else, that a child’s illness involved the attention of everyone around her.
Gomes-Pedro was everything, he reached the top of every mountain he climbed – doctorate, professor, service director, influential figure in the hospital, in the city and in the country. He made the child the center of the future, the priority of priorities. The voice of each boy and girl began to be considered, with it the door was also opened to combat those who try, in all forms, to kill childhood. Bruises, even those that are not seen, began to be considered.
He often said that there should be a Children’s Ministry. He would have been an extraordinary minister, he was an extraordinary man.
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