 He created a nursing school and was the founder of the concept of sanitary medicine, the first chairman of tropical medicine and the graduate study of hygiene.Chagas died in Rio de Janeiro from a heart attack in 1934 at 55 years of age.One of his sons, Carlos Chagas Filho (1910–2000), became an eminent and internationally recognized scientist in the field of neurophysiology and president of the Pontifical Academy of Sciences.