Gertrud Hurler

Gertrud Hurler, born Gertrud Zach on 1 September 1889 in Taberwiese in East Prussia, was a German pediatrician whose name is attached to Hurler syndrome. She was schooled in Königsberg and took her medical degree at the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität in Munich. She married the veterinary surgeon Konrad Hurler in 1914, and the couple had a daughter and a son. While in postgraduate pediatric training at the Hauner Children's Hospital in Munich she saw two infants with clouded corneas, short stature, a skeletal dysplasia, spinal misalignment and intellectual disability. The condition had been called gargoylism or lipochondrodystrophy, and it came to carry her name even though her chief, Professor von Pfaundler, had first reported the cases to the Munich Pediatric Society. Hurler wrote the cases up in German in 1919 under the title Über einen Typ multipler Abartungen, vorwiegend am Skelettsystem. The disease later became known as Hurler syndrome, with a milder form called Hurler-Scheie syndrome. In 1919 she opened a private pediatric practice in Neuhausen, which she kept until her death in 1965.