José António Serrano
José António Serrano was a Portuguese physician and anatomist. Serrano is particularly noted for his osteological treatise Tratado de Osteologia Humana, and for his advances in surgery in Portugal: while a distinguished surgeon in Saint Joseph's Hospital in Lisbon, he was an early follower of Lister's asseptic technique, and the first in the country to perform a laparotomic histerectomy.
In the summer of 1890, Serrano and Bettencourt Rodrigues pioneered the treatment of endocrine disorders by subcutaneously grafting the thyroid gland of a sheep to treat myxedema and subsequently proposing hypodermic injections of thyroid extract to achieve the same result; their findings were overshadowed by George R. Murray's later paper published in the more accessible British Medical Journal.
