An unusual medical condition -- early and progressive arthritis, sight and hearing loss, cleft soft palates -- had bedeviled physicians for decades, going back to Dr. Charles Mayo in the 1800s.
Then in 1960 Dr. Gunnar Stickler, a rising pediatrician at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, examined a 12-year-old boy in Faribault who showed the symptoms. A few years later, Stickler and his colleagues for the first time described the genetic disorder, which he called hereditary progressive arthro-ophthalmopathy.
The world gave it an easier name to remember: Stickler syndrome.
Stickler, 85, who during his 32 years at Mayo left a lasting mark on the clinic's pediatrics programs, died Nov. 4 of a stroke at his home in Wayzata. He had suffered for years with Parkinson's disease.
Dr. Patricia Simmons, who made Mayo her home after interviewing with Stickler as a young doctor in 1977, said her mentor and longtime friend was witty, passionate and driven to excel. A German immigrant, he urged doctors to question assumptions, whether societal or medical, and to give patients a diagnosis rather than a range of possible problems.
"He challenged all of us to do our very best by every patient and have our decisions defensible by science and facts," said Simmons, a University of Minnesota regent in charge of the pediatrics division at Mayo.
Stickler's daughter, Kati Lovaas of Wayzata, said he was "the cool dad" who always had interesting people, from Chinese medical residents to German journalists, trooping through their home.
"He was the kind of guy that, the night before he died, he still came to the dinner table with an article he had cut out from the New York Times to talk about with his grandchildren," she said.
