Manuel Macedo was Professor of Cardiothoracic Surgery in Lisbon and an internationally respected thoracic surgeon. He was born in the Azores in 1922. He studied medicine at the medical school of Lisbon University, and graduated in 1946, after which he spent a year as honorary assistant to Löffler at the University of Zurich, before returning to Lisbon to do junior posts for the next four years. In 1952, he won a British Council scholarship, which took him to England, where he attended a course at the Brompton Hospital, and was taken under the wing of Sir Clement Price Thomas, who arranged for him to work at the Leicester Chest Unit under Gordon Cruickshank and Betty Slesser. During a period when Cruickshank was away in the United States, Macedo seized the opportunity to work with Phillip Allison in Leeds as a locum senior registrar in the absence of Alf Gunning, and visited A L d'Abreu and Jack Collis in Birmingham. At the end of his year in Leicester, he was invited to stay on as a senior house officer, with the actual duties of registrar. He gained considerable practical experience while he was in the UK, and on his return to Portugal in 1954 he passed a new competitive examination to become consultant in thoracic surgery at the City Hospitals in Lisbon. He was appointed in 1956. He began a programme of open heart surgery, eventually establishing two centres in the Lisbon area, becoming director of the department of thoracic surgery in 1969 and Professor of Cardiothoracic Surgery at the New University of Lisbon in 1979, and at the University of Lisbon in 1985. He founded the Portuguese Society of Surgery, and the Portuguese Society of Cardiothoracic and Vascular Surgery, of which he was the first President. In 1987, he was President of the Portuguese Medical Association. He kept up his contacts with his colleagues in the UK, and was made the first foreign member of the Society of Thoracic and Cardiovascular Surgeons. In 1986 he was President of the European Society for Cardiovascular Surgery, presiding over the congress in Brighton. He received many national and international honours. He was a member of the Royal Academy of Medicine in Belgium. He was a Chevalier de la Légion d'Honneur and Commandeur de l'Ordre du Mérite of France, and in Portugal was appointed a Great Official of the Order of Santiago and the Sword. He was made an honorary FRCS in 1990. He died in 2000.