Toulouse-Lautrec syndrome is the popular name for pycnodysostosis, a rare inherited bone disease in which the bones grow dense but break easily and adults stay short. It is named for the painter Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, who is believed to have had it.
Lautrec stopped growing at about five feet, with the torso of a grown man on the legs of a child. Doctors later attached a disease to that build, and his name to the disease.
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"Believed" is the right word. The painter was 36 when he died, on September 9, 1901, and his disease would wait some sixty years before anyone described it.
No doctor of his time left a written diagnosis, and no X-ray of his skeleton has come down to us either.
The label came afterward, as an inference about a man dead for sixty-four years. It rests on what his life shows: the thigh bones he broke as a boy, the legs that stopped growing, the family he was born into.
The two doctors behind the name
The diagnosis goes back to two French doctors, Pierre Maroteaux and Maurice Lamy, who recognized in patients with dense, fragile bones an illness that earlier doctors had mistaken for others…
What You'll Discover
What goes wrong inside the bone.
What happened to his legs at thirteen.
Why his family tree matters.
What else the doctors suspected.