Joannes Cassianus Pompe

Joannes Cassianus Pompe (1901 to 1945) was a Dutch pathologist who gave the first description of the condition now called Pompe disease, or glycogen storage disease type II. Born in Utrecht, he studied medicine at the University of Utrecht and trained as a pathologist in Amsterdam. In 1930 he performed an autopsy on a seven-month-old girl who had died of unknown causes and found the greatly enlarged heart that marks the infantile form of the disease; microscopy showed the muscle tissue distorted into a pentagonal mesh. He published his findings in 1932 under the title Over idiopathische hypertrophie van het hart. In 1945 the Nazi occupiers arrested him for hiding a transmitter in his laboratory that was used to send messages to Britain for the resistance, and he was executed with nineteen others as a reprisal for the destruction of a railway bridge. His older brother Willem Pompe was a criminologist.