Manuel Isaías López

Manuel Isaías López (May 20, 1941 - November 29, 2017) was a prominent child psychiatrist, trained in Philadelphia. Many consider Manuel Isaías López to be the father of Mexican Child and Adolescent Psychiatry. In 1972, he founded the first Child and Adolescent Psychiatry subspecialty program in Mexico, at the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM). He also founded and was the first president of AMPI (Mexican Child Psychiatry Association) in 1975. He was the training director of the only child and adolescent psychiatry training program in Mexico, at UNAM, from 1972 until 1998. In the last quarter of the twentieth century, Manuel Isaías López was considered the most influential psychiatrist in Mexico. In the early 1980s, he was simultaneously president of the Mexican Psychoanalytic Association; secretary general of the Mexican Board of Psychiatry; director of child and adolescent psychiatry at UNAM; and main consultant to the System for the Integral Development of the Family (DIF), a nationwide government funded system of child and family guidance centers. His later contributions were in Bioethics, and he evolved into a researcher within this field and an International Psychoanalytic Association officer. Manuel Isaías López was born into a middle-class family on 20 May 1941. Raised as an only child in downtown Mexico City, López's father, Isaías López Suárez, was a Spanish prestigious downtown "abarrotero" (grocer) who owned his own food store. López's mother, Carmen Gómez Alatriste (de López), came from a Mexican family with historical lineage in Puebla. Her family had been much involved in the Mexican Liberal Movement of the 19th Century. Carmen's cousin, Aquiles Serdán Alatriste, was a notable figure of the Mexican Revolution of 1910. Carmen was also great-granddaughter of Miguel Cástulo Alatriste, a Governor of Puebla who fought as a liberal and was slayed during the "Guerra de Reforma" (Reform War). Manuel Isaías López was exposed to eminent Mexican intellectuals since he was a child.