Antoine Marfan (1858-1942) was a French physician who became interested in pediatrics when he deputised for a colleague at Paris's Hospital for Sick Children in the late 1800s. Marfan believed medicine should be based on methodical and vigorous observation of the patient. It was in the course of his clinical studies in 1896 that he described the main features of a syndrome that later was given his name. Marfan's patient, a five-year-old girl, was thin, and had long limbs and abnormally long fingers and toes. Marfan compared the girl's long digits to the legs of a spider, which gave the condition its medical name, arachnodacryly, from the Greek word for "spider," arachne .

Marfan's findings had been suggested 20 years earlier by an eye doctor in Cincinnati, Ohio, who described a tremor in the irises of a brother and sister with long limbs and exceptionally flexible joints--all subsequently shown...