Hugo Liepmann

Hugo Karl Liepmann was a German neurologist and psychiatrist, born in Berlin in 1863 into a Jewish family. He first studied chemistry and philosophy at Freiburg and Leipzig and took a doctorate in 1885, then turned to medicine and worked as an assistant to Carl Wernicke at the psychiatric clinic in Breslau. He became head physician at Dalldorf in Berlin-Wittenau in 1906 and director of the municipal asylum at Lichtenberg in 1914. Liepmann is remembered for pioneering work on the localization of brain function. From anatomical studies he argued that planned and commanded actions are governed by the parietal lobe of the dominant hemisphere rather than the frontal lobe. In 1900 he introduced the term apraxia for the inability to carry out planned, coordinated movements despite intact muscles and senses, and he divided it into ideational, ideomotor and kinetic types. He died in 1925.