Meynert, Theodor

   (pronounced [MY-Nert])

   (1833–1892)

   Remembered for having placed the structure and function of the central nervous system on a scientific basis, Meynert was born in Dresden, Germany, his father a writer and historian and his mother a singer at the Court Opera. In 1841, the family moved to Vienna, where Meynert studied medicine, obtaining in 1865 under the great Vienna pathologist Karl von Rokitansky (1804–1878) his Habilitation as private docent for neuroanatomy. In 1865, he also became a staff psychiatrist at the Lower Austrian Insane Asylum in Vienna and was placed in charge of the pathology department. After visiting a series of asylums abroad, in 1868 Meynert was made lecturer in psychiatry and 2 years later, in 1870, became professor of psychiatry in the clinic of the Vienna Asylum. (It was only in 1872 that he got the university chair of psychiatry.) Interestingly, he became professor of psychiatry with professional training only in neuroanatomy. Owing to personal conflicts, in 1875 a second chair of psychiatry was created in Vienna expressly for Meynert, this one at the General Hospital (in addition to the chair at the Vienna asylum). Meynert shifted to this new chair, which he occupied until his death. (See also Vienna for the academic politics of these moves.) Among Meynert’s students were some of the most distinguished psychiatrists of the day, including Carl Wernicke (1848–1905) (see Wernicke–Kleist–Leonhard Pathway); Auguste Forel (1848–1931); Arnold Pick (1851–1924, see Dementia: Pick’s disease [1892]); and Josef Berze (1866–1958), for many years director of the Vienna city asylum "Am Steinhof." Sigmund Freud also studied with Meynert for a period, though he detested Meynert’s organicism, as psychiatry historian Albrecht Hirschmüller has noted.

   Meynert is remembered for his great treatises on neuroanatomy, The Architecture of the Cerebral Cortex and Its Regional Variations (Der Bau der Gross-Hirnrinde und seine örtlichen Verschiedenheiten) published in 1869, and Psychiatric Clinic: Illnesses Involving the Forebrain, on the Basis of Its Architecture, Function and Physiology (Psychiatrie. Klinik der Erkrankungen des Vorderhirns, begründet auf dessen Bau, Leistungen und Ernährung), published in 1884–1885 and translated into a number of languages. Although much mocked by the psychoanalytically oriented Viennese (and by later generations of psychoanalyst-historians), Meynert’s interest in brain biology turned out to be prescient. In retrospect, Meynert stands with Kraepelin and Freud among the great psychiatrists of the nineteenth century.