Antonio Béguez César

He was born in Santiago de Cuba. In 1910, he began attending the Institute of Secondary Education in his native city and four years later he graduated as a Bachelor, after which he went to Havana to begin his medical studies at the capital's university.

In 1919, having graduated as a physician, he returned to Santiago de Cuba to try to obtain a position at "Saturnino Lora" Hospital, at the Centro Gallego or at the Colonia Española; but failing to do so, he moved to the city of Cárdenas in Matanzas province, where in addition to securing employment as a physician, he contracted marriage.

In 1921 he returned to Santiago de Cuba to care for his ill mother and worked in his private practice until 1936.

In 1929, thanks to the economic contribution of Mr. Desiderio Parreño, he installed a small ward in the aforementioned hospital center, equipped with 30 beds and some chairs donated by a charitable institution, and where his professional work was provided free of charge. Thus was born the "Alberto Parreño" ward, the embryo of pediatric medicine in Santiago and a place of apostolic dedication for Dr. Béguez César, alongside whom other distinguished pediatricians from the region contributed their valuable work.

His persistent interest in patient care and research, evidenced in his personal archives, made it possible to present and discuss weekly with the other physicians in the ward and guests from others, the rare or special cases that needed to be analyzed jointly. These scientific meetings surrounded him with a certain number of professionals who, like him, sought in the children's ward the excellence of the most up-to-date knowledge to ensure the survival or alleviate the suffering of the pediatric population, in such a way that they came to constitute a true scientific group.

In 1933, while serving as an unpaid physician at "Saturnino Lora" Hospital, he treated a sick child from a private consultation whose symptomatic presentation caused him a strange sensation of uncertainty, even more so when the patient died a few days after treatment. For a long time afterward insomnia accompanied Dr. Béguez César, who recorded everything concerning the case in the clinical history. Subsequently he treated two other small children with symptoms and signs similar to those of the deceased child, who turned out to be his siblings. This was so surprising to him that he devoted himself earnestly to investigating what the causes of these inevitable but interrelated deaths were.

He studied and exhaustively evaluated the clinical manifestations of this rare condition through careful investigations and compiled all available worldwide medical literature on the subject until, after a thorough clinical evaluation of those cases, he concluded that it was a new disease, previously unknown, but lethal.

What had caused long sleepless nights for Dr. Béguez César transformed into great excitement, as he had discovered a new entity in medicine which he defined as "familial chronic malignant neutropenia" and about which he was absolutely certain that nothing had been written except what he himself described during the detection and confirmation of the hereditary process.

So that his discovery could not be plagiarized or usurped, he published the results of his investigations in volume 15 of the Bulletin of the Cuban Society of Pediatrics in 1943. Subsequently the international scientific community recognized that familial chronic malignant neutropenia was indeed a new discovery in medicine.

Dr. Antonio Béguez César founded, together with a group of colleagues, the Cuban Society of Pediatrics of the Orient, based in Santiago de Cuba, of which he was its first president and as such attended as a delegate to the First National Pediatrics Conference, held in Camagüey. In 1936, when he finally obtained a position as Head of Service of the children's ward at "Saturnino Lora" Hospital -- with a salary of 115 pesos, which although modest at least allowed him to mitigate his hardships and moderately support his family, this time with a fixed state salary -- he organized the Second National Pediatrics Conference, which took place in Santiago de Cuba and where he presented his work titled "Weir-Mitchell Disease or Erythromelalgia". At the Third National Conference, held in Matanzas in 1939, he made known his observation on the craniopharyngioma tumor, the first one made about this neoplasm in Cuba.

In 1943 he identified and described in Cuba a rare disease, known worldwide as Chediak-Higashi syndrome, which should have been justly recognized as Béguez-Chediak-Higashi syndrome because of the scientific rigor of his contributions in this regard.

After upgrading the children's ward of the aforementioned hospital institution until 1959, the following year he began working at the Northern Children's Hospital (ONDI) in Santiago de Cuba, in the company of former colleagues from "Saturnino Lora", the doctors: Alfonso Araújo Ruiz, Ernesto Fábregas Giro, Liliam Jeanjaques Peter, Nastia Elia Noa and his son Efrén Béguez López, then director of the unit.

Dr. Antonio Béguez César practiced the profession of medicine for more than half a century, always with the dynamism and selflessness of his early years as a graduate. He died in Santiago de Cuba in February 1976, deeply loved by all who knew him, admired and respected by the generations of pediatricians whom he so competently trained and followed in his inexhaustible efforts to save lives by the entire Cuban scientific community.