Indelible traces of the master who forged Antioquian neurology: In memory of Carlos Santiago Uribe (January 20, 1935 - March 23, 2025)

Abstract

There are lives that are narrated with dates and others that we tell following their footprints. Carlos Santiago Uribe left his in the corridors of the San Vicente Hospital, between the blocks of the Faculty of Medicine of the University of Antioquia, in the texts he gave to his students, in the silent dawns in which knowledge was sown as if cultivating a garden. He left calmly, as he lived, but his voice, serene, patient and wise, continues to resonate in those of us who had the joy of listening to him.

He was born on January 20, 1935 in Medellín, Colombia, on the emblematic Junín Street. He was the youngest in his family, grew up among books and from childhood showed a rare blend of sensitivity and discipline, qualities that would later define his medical vocation.

His love for medicine was an early calling. He cut out articles, read them with devotion and dreamed of relieving. He studied at the Ateneo and San Ignacio schools, and then entered the School of Medicine at the University of Antioquia, which would always be his alma mater, from which he graduated in 1958. In 1959, he entered as a resident in the joint program of Neurology and Neurosurgery at the University of Antioquia, from which he was the first graduate and also the future architect of what would become the first accredited Neurology program in Colombia.

The desire to learn took him to Boston, to the Massachusetts General Hospital of Harvard, where he trained with giants of Neurology such as Raymond Adams and Robert Schwab, and deepened his knowledge in electroencephalography. In this adventure he was accompanied by María Cecilia, his life partner, who learned to enjoy with him the passion for the waves and electrodes of the electroencephalograph.

Then he chose to return to Antioquia, he chose his people, but above all, he chose to educate. For more than half a century he was a professor of Neurology and more than teaching, he accompanied; more than correcting, he inspired.