author
Bento Morganti
b. 1709
Born in Rome to Portuguese parents and raised in Portugal, this 18th-century writer moved easily between scholarship, satire, and social criticism. His surviving works show a lively, questioning mind interested in medicine, public life, and the reforming spirit of the Portuguese Enlightenment.
2 Audiobooks
Sustos da Vida nos Perigos da Cura
by Bento Morganti
About the author
Born on October 13, 1709, in Rome, Bento Morganti was the son of Portuguese parents and came to Portugal while still very young. He studied at the Colégio de Santo Antão and later at the University of Coimbra, where he trained in canon law. Sources also describe him as a secular priest connected with the Basilica of Santa Maria in Lisbon, and he is sometimes listed as having written under the pseudonym José Acúrsio de Tavares.
Morganti wrote across a wide range of subjects. His known works include Nummismalogia (1737), an early study of medals and coins; Descripção fúnebre das exéquias (1750); and the sharply critical Sustos da Vida nos Perigos da Cura (1756), a lively attack on the medical practices of his day. He is also associated with Collecçam dos Papeis Anonymos, a publication later described by scholars as the first spectator-style text to appear in the Iberian Peninsula.
What makes his work memorable is its mix of learned curiosity and strong opinion. Whether writing about numismatics, comets, ceremony, or medicine, he comes across as a figure engaged with the debates of 18th-century Portugal. The exact date of his death is uncertain, though several sources give 1783 as a possible year.