Hermann Oppenheim

Hermann Oppenheim (1857 to 1919) was a German neurologist and psychiatrist, born in Warburg in Westphalia and active in Berlin. The son of a rabbi, he studied medicine at Göttingen, Berlin and Bonn, took his doctorate in Bonn in 1881 and from 1883 to 1891 worked as an assistant to Carl Westphal in the nerve clinic of the Charité. He qualified as a university lecturer in neurology in 1886. After a request for a professorship was refused he founded a private clinic at Schiffbauerdamm 25 in Berlin, which gained international standing, and in 1902 he left the medical faculty. His research dealt with injuries of the nervous system and tumours of the central nervous system, with tabes, multiple sclerosis, progressive paralysis and bulbar paralysis, and he helped establish neurology as a discipline in its own right. His theory that traumatic neurosis follows directly from traumatic experience, set against Jean-Martin Charcot's theory of hysteria, was especially disputed, and he applied it to war tremblers while running a military hospital in the First World War.