Antoine Marfan
Antoine Bernard- Jean Marfan ( born June 23, 1858 in Castelnaudary, Aude, † 1942) was a French pediatrician.
Life
Antoine Marfan was the son of a country doctor with modest means, who initially wanted to stop him, to follow in his footsteps. After the father finally consented Marfan in 1877 visited the medical school in Toulouse. Two years later he moved to Paris. After an interruption by the military service he completed his medical studies in 1886 and received a year later the doctorate. From 1889 to 1892 he was chef de clinique Medicale. In 1892 he became a lecturer of Pediatrics, Faculty of Medicine University of Paris and took in the winter months, Jacques -Joseph des Enfants Malades Hospital in Grancher. There, his interest in pediatrics was awakened. He became head of the department diphtheria and 1910 Professor of therapy. In 1914 he was appointed to the first Chair of Childhood Hygiene at the newly established University Children's Hospital in Paris. From the same year he was a member of the Académie de Médecine. Until his retirement in 1928, he remained active as a physician at the Hôpital des Enfants Malades.
In addition to his medical practice Marfan was a very cultured person with a great interest in art and literature. He enjoyed attending concerts as well as his trips to Italy, where he was particularly interested in Venetian painting. In retirement, he wrote biographies of his friend Emile Broca and his father.
Work
With his dissertation on disorders and injuries of the stomach in pulmonary tuberculosis Marfan laid the foundation for his further interest for this disease. This work led to the formulation of a concept that became known as Marfan's law in the medical literature. It states that patients who were affected in their early childhood of laryngeal tuberculosis, later exceptionally rare ill with pulmonary tuberculosis. Among other things, this realization led a little later to the development of BCG vaccination. As one of the first physicians Marfan recognized the importance of skin reactions for the diagnosis of tuberculosis and put the tuberculin test immediately after the development by Clemens von Pirquet in clinical trials. He also explored the harmful effects of infant feeding by goat's milk and put extensive research on the rickets at - Marfan's character is named after him.
It appeared as numerous publications of Marfan. He co-authored an award-winning textbook for the treatment of diseases in childhood (1892 ) and co-founder and editor of a journal called Le Nourrisson ( The infant ).
In 1896 he presented before the " Société Médicale des Hôpitaux de Paris " in the case of the five- year-old girl Gabrielle with exceptionally long and narrow limbs, what Marfan described as dolichostenomelia. For the long slender fingers, he coined the term Spinnenfingrigkeit ( Arachnodakytlie ). The abnormalities had already been noticed by the mother at child's birth and increased with the growth even further. Six years later, the girl was examined by other doctors, which now already got the X-ray diagnostics. They described a curvature of the spine and an asymmetry of the chest. In the same year Emile Charles Achard described another girl with similar symptoms and a marked hypermobility ( Hyperlaxizität ). In further studies the complex of symptoms were still associated with changes in the cardiovascular system and the eyes. Later it was recognized as an autosomal dominant hereditary disease and was first described in 1931 by Utrecht doctors as Marfan syndrome, as it then entered the medical literature.
The French girl first description of Marfan died at a young age of tuberculosis, so that the diagnosis was never confirmed beyond doubt. In contrast, it has been doubted on several occasions that Gabrielle suffered from Marfan syndrome, most recently in 1972 by Hecht and Beals, the suspected congenital arachnodactyly.
Honors
Marfan in 1934 was elected Honorary Fellow of the Royal Society of Medicine of the United Kingdom of Great Britain.