Maria José von Paumgartten Deane (1916–1995): pioneer of Tropical Medicine and Parasitology in Latin America

Abstract

Maria José von Paumgartten Deane (1916–1995) was born in Belém, Pará State, Brazil, and graduated from the School of Medicine and Surgery of Pará in 1937. She was the only woman in Evandro Chagas' group that sought out patients with American visceral leishmaniasis (AVL) in Pará. She participated (1939–1942) in the Anopheles gambiae eradication campaign and married (1940) Leônidas Deane, a research partner until he died in 1993. She traveled with her husband through the Amazon (1942–1944), studying the transmission of malaria and the native fauna of anophelines. She completed her master's degree (1945) at the Johns
Hopkins School of Hygiene and Public Health in Baltimore, US. In Belém, she studied filariasis, leptospirosis, and the trypanosomatids, as well as their hosts. The couple investigated (1954) the AVL outbreak in Sobral, Ceará State, describing the first wild host of neotropical kala-azar. In the 1960 and 1970s, at the Faculty of Medicine of the University of São Paulo, she studied the biology and ultrastructure of Trypanosoma cruzi and other trypanosomatids. To stay close to her daughter, who had been in exile since 1969, she moved to the Institute of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine in Lisbon (1975–1976), Portugal, and then to the University of Carabobo (1976–1979), Venezuela. At the Oswaldo Cruz Institute (1980–1995), she discovered the T. cruzi double-cycle in the opossum, the most significant discovery of this phase of her career. Due to the scope, relevance, and chronology of her contributions, Maria was the pioneer of Tropical Medicine and Parasitology in Latin America and one of the pioneers worldwide.