Antoine Marfan

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Antoine Marfan
portrait by Henry Bataille

Antoine Bernard-Jean Marfan (born June 23, 1858 in Castelnaudary , Département Aude , † February 11, 1942 ) was a French pediatrician .

Life

Antoine Marfan was the son of a country doctor with modest means who initially wanted to prevent him from following in his footsteps. After the father finally consented, Marfan attended medical school in Toulouse in 1877 . Two years later he moved to Paris . After an interruption due to military service, he completed his medical degree in 1886 and received his doctorate a year later. From 1889 to 1892 he was Chef de clinique medicale . In 1892 he became a lecturer in paediatrics at the Medical Faculty of the University of Paris and represented Jacques-Joseph Grancher at the Hôpital des Enfants Malades during the winter months . There his interest in paediatrics was aroused. He became head of the diphtheria department and in 1910 professor of therapy. In 1914 he was appointed to the first chair for child hygiene at the newly established university children's clinic in Paris. From the same year he was a member of the Acádemie de Médecine . Until his retirement in 1928 he worked as a doctor at the Hôpital des Enfants Malades .

In addition to his medical work, Marfan was a very cultivated person with a great interest in art and literature. He enjoyed going to concerts as well as his trips to Italy, during which he was particularly interested in Venetian painting. In retirement he wrote biographies about his friend Emile Broca and his father.

plant

With his dissertation on disorders and damage to the stomach in pulmonary tuberculosis , Marfan laid the foundation for his further interest in this disease. This work led to the formulation of a concept that entered medical literature as Marfan's Law . It says that patients who had laryngeal tuberculosis in their early childhood are exceptionally likely to develop pulmonary tuberculosis later on. Among other things, this knowledge led to the development of the BCG vaccination a little later . As one of the first physicians, Marfan recognized the great importance of skin reactions for the diagnosis of tuberculosis and used the tuberculin test in clinical studies immediately after it was developed by Clemens von Pirquet . He also researched the harmful effects of baby feeding with goat milk and carried out extensive research on rickets - the Marfan symbol is named after him.

Extensive publications by Marfan appeared. He was the co-author of an award-winning textbook on the treatment of childhood diseases (1892) and the co-founder and editor of a journal called Le Nourrisson (The Infant) .

In 1896 he presented before the Société Médicale des Hôpitaux de Paris the case of the five-year-old girl Gabrielle with exceptionally long, narrow limbs, which Marfan called dolichostenomelia. For the long, narrow fingers he coined the term spider fingering (arachnodactyly) . The abnormalities had already been noticed by the mother when the child was born and increased even further as the child grew. Six years later, the girl was examined by other doctors, who now also had X-ray diagnostics at their disposal. They described a curvature of the spine and an asymmetry of the rib cage. In the same year Emile Charles Achard described another girl with similar symptoms and pronounced hypermobility (hyperlaxicity). In further investigations, changes in the cardiovascular system and the eyes were assigned to the symptom complex. Later it was used as an autosomal - dominant inherited disorder recognized and the first time in 1931 by Utrecht doctors as Marfan syndrome , described as it then entered the medical literature.

The French girl from Marfan's first description died of tuberculosis in adolescence, so the diagnosis could never be confirmed beyond doubt. On the other hand, it has been questioned several times that Gabrielle suffered from Marfan syndrome, most recently in 1972 by Hecht and Beals, who suspected congenital contractural arachnodactyly .

Honors

In 1934, Marfan was elected an honorary member of the Royal Society of Medicine of the United Kingdom of Great Britain.

literature

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Barbara I. Tshisuaka: Marfan, Jean Bernard Antoine. In: Werner E. Gerabek , Bernhard D. Haage, Gundolf Keil , Wolfgang Wegner (eds.): Enzyklopädie Medizingeschichte. De Gruyter, Berlin / New York 2005, ISBN 3-11-015714-4 , p. 892.
  2. ↑ A. Marfan: Un cas de deformation congénitale des quatre membres, plus prononcéeaux extrémités, charactérisée pa l'allon gement des os avec un certain degré d'amincissement. In: Bull. Mém. Soc. méd. Hôp. Volume 13, (Paris) 1896, pp. 220-226.
  3. ↑ Chantal Maron: Marfan: une maladie connue, un pédiatre oublié . In: Le Journal du Médecin (Belgique) 2013, No. 2317 of May 10, 2013, page 17.
personal data
SURNAME Marfan, Antoine
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Marfan, Antoine Bernard-Jean (full name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION French pediatrician
DATE OF BIRTH June 23, 1858
PLACE OF BIRTH Castelnaudary , Aude department
DATE OF DEATH February 11, 1942