Theodor Ziehen

Georg Theodor Ziehen (1862 to 1950) was a German neurologist and psychiatrist born in Frankfurt am Main, the son of the author Eduard Ziehen. He studied medicine at Würzburg and Berlin, took his doctorate in 1885, and worked under Karl Ludwig Kahlbaum at Görlitz and Otto Binswanger at Jena, where one of his patients was the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche. He became professor of psychiatry at Utrecht, Halle and Berlin, and later professor of philosophy at Halle. He published nearly 450 works, including a textbook on mental diseases of childhood that is reported to be the first systematic German work on child psychiatry, and a psychiatry textbook that ran to four editions between 1894 and 1911. He is credited with introducing the terms affective psychosis and psychopathic constitution, he coined the term nucleus accumbens, and with Hermann Oppenheim he gives his name to the Ziehen-Oppenheim syndrome, a torsion dystonia.