Paul Flechsig

Paul Emil Flechsig (1847 to 1929) was a German neuroanatomist, psychiatrist and neuropathologist born in Zwickau who spent more than fifty years of his career at Leipzig, where he became professor of psychiatry in 1884 and directed the clinical institute of psychiatry and neurology. He is chiefly remembered for myelinogenesis: staining the brains of late-term fetuses and newborns for myelin, he mapped the cerebral cortex by the order in which regions acquire myelin, and he named the last-myelinating regions the association zones. His students included Emil Kraepelin and Oskar Vogt. He treated Daniel Paul Schreber, whose memoir Sigmund Freud later analyzed. Flechsig's tract and a brain research institute in Leipzig carry his name.