Daniel Alcides Carrión

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Daniel Alcides Carrión was a Peruvian medical student who gave his name to Carrion's disease. He described the disease in the course of what proved to be a fatal experiment upon himself in 1885, after arranging to be infected by a close friend in order to demonstrate definitively the cause of the illness. His aim was to prove a link between the acute blood stage of Oroya Fever with that of the later chronic form of the disease typified by numerous red wart-like dermal nodules. Neither the cause nor mode of transmission of Oroya Fever was then known and, furthermore, the relationship between the acute and chronic forms of the disease was not proven. After his death from the disease, his friend was arrested and tried for murder. Dr. Carrión was related to the family of Alejandro and Clodoveo Carrión of nearby Loja, Ecuador.

[edit] References

• Daniel Alcides Carrión, short biography on whonamedit.com.
• (Spanish) Gregorio Delgado García and Ana M. Delgado Rodríguez, Daniel Alcides Carrión y su aporte al conocimiento clínico de la fiebre de la Oroya y verruga peruana, Cuaderno de Historia, No. 80, 1995. First presented at I Congreso Nacional de Historia de la Ciencia y la Técnica. Havana, November 15, 1994.