Juan Pedro Garrahan

Juan Pedro Garrahan was born in Buenos Aires on 24 September 1893, the grandson of Patrick Garrahan of Co. Westmeath, according to Edmundo Murray's entry in the Dictionary of Irish Latin American Biography. He spent his career at the Hospital de Clínicas. In 1942 Juan Jorge Murtagh, who had studied under Bernardo Houssay, succeeded him as head of paediatrics at the Maternity Institute. In 1979 the National Paediatrics Hospital was renamed Hospital Dr Juan Pedro Garrahan.

His death date is uncertain in the sources opened. The text of Murray's entry gives 3 April 1965, but the entry's own heading and the dictionary's entry on Murtagh give 1968. The dictionary's entries were written between 2003 and 2009 and contain some internal errors of this kind, so the site says only that he died in the 1960s until a second source settles it.

The research treats Garrahan and Michael O'Gorman as the two ends of an Irish thread in Argentine medicine. An Ennis-born physician founded medical teaching in Buenos Aires in the eighteenth century, and two centuries later Irish-Argentine doctors, Garrahan among them, led Argentine paediatrics. The hospital that carries his name is the hook: it is the national children's hospital.