Pierre Marie


Pierre Marie was a French neurologist who was a native of Paris.

Life and career

After finishing medical school, he served as an interne, working as an assistant to neurologist Jean-Martin Charcot at the Salpêtrière and Bicêtre Hospitals in Paris. In 1883 he received his medical doctorate with a graduate thesis on Basedow’s disease, being promoted to médecin des hôpitaux several years later. In 1907 he attained the chair of pathological anatomy at the Faculty of Medicine, and in 1917 was appointed to the chair of neurology, a position he held until 1925. In 1911 Marie became a member of the Académie de Médecine.
One of Marie's earlier contributions was a description of a disorder of the pituitary gland known as acromegaly. His analysis of the disease was an important contribution in the emerging field of endocrinology. Marie is also credited as the first to describe pulmonary hypertrophic osteoarthropathy, cleidocranial dysostosis and rhizomelic spondylosis. In his extensive research of aphasia, his views concerning language disorders sharply contrasted the generally accepted views of Paul Broca. In 1907, he was the first person to describe the speech production disorder of foreign accent syndrome.
Marie was the first general secretary of the Société Française de Neurologie, and with Édouard Brissaud, he was co-founder of the journal Revue neurologique. His name is associated with the eponymous Charcot–Marie–Tooth disease, being named along with Jean-Martin Charcot and Howard Henry Tooth. This disease is characterized by gradual progressive loss of distal muscle tissue in the arms and feet. It is considered the most common disease within a group of conditions known as "hereditary motor and sensory neuropathies".
Among the doctors trained by Pierre Marie at the beginning of the XXth century account the Spanish neuropathologists Nicolás Achúcarro and Gonzalo Rodríguez Lafora, two distinguished disciples of Santiago Ramón y Cajal and members of the Spanish Neurological School.

Associated eponyms