Alfred Hauptmann

Alfred Hauptmann (1881 to 1948) was a German-Jewish psychiatrist and neurologist, born in Gleiwitz in Upper Silesia. His career was shaped by his time with the neurologist Max Nonne in Hamburg. After working in Heidelberg and Hamburg he went to the University of Freiburg Hospital, where he completed his habilitation in 1912 and published his best-known article, on the effectiveness of phenobarbital as an anti-epileptic. He became an extraordinary professor at Freiburg in 1918 and in 1926 took the chair of psychiatry at the University of Halle, where he directed the psychiatric and mental hospital until 1935, and he was a member of the Leopoldina. The Nazi discriminatory laws ended his chair and his work as a doctor, and after a temporary imprisonment in the Dachau concentration camp he emigrated by way of Switzerland and England to the United States, taking a position at the Joseph H. Pratt Diagnostic Clinic in Boston. With the internist Siegfried Thannhauser he described in 1941 an inherited myopathy now called Hauptmann-Thannhauser muscular dystrophy. An Alfred Hauptmann Prize for epilepsy research has been awarded since 1979. He died in Boston in 1948.