LUIS MORQUIO (Uruguay)

LUIS MORQUIO (1867–1935)

Uruguayan physician and paediatrician.
He is considered the father of paediatrics in Uruguay and the greatest personality of South American paediatrics.

Luis Morquio qualified in medicine from the University of Montevideo in 1892.
In the following year he began a medical training in Paris. He specialised in paediatrics at Jacques-Joseph Grancher's clinic for sick children.
Morquio also studied at the Pasteur Institute.

In 1894 he returned to Uruguay, where he opened practice as a paediatrician and became professor of paediatrics in Montevideo.

He is remembered for Morquio syndrome, a lysosomal disorder also known as "mucopolysaccharidosis type IV". The condition was first described, simultaneously and independently, in 1929, by Luis Morquio in Montevideo, and by James F. Brailsford in England.

Morquio was a founder of the Sociedad Uruguaya de Pediatría in 1915.
The French government conferred upon him the rank of officer of the Légion d'Honneur.

In 1930 he was appointed director of the Clínica Pediátrica y Puericultura (the Institute of Clinical Pediatrics) in Montevideo.

Morquio wrote many publications in the field of pathology and hygiene of paediatrics, and two paediatric textbooks.

A bust was erected in his honour at the Institute of Paediatrics, in Montevideo, after his death in 1935.


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