Ludvig Puusepp

Ludvig Puusepp was an Estonian surgeon and researcher, born in Kyiv in 1875 to an Estonian father and a Polish-Czech mother, who is remembered as the world's first professor of neurosurgery. He trained in St. Petersburg at the Military Medical Academy, began neurology under Vladimir Bekhterev, and performed his first neurosurgical operation in 1899. From 1907 he headed an independent department of surgical neurology in St. Petersburg, and with Bekhterev he tried frontal leucotomy on three patients before abandoning it. In 1920 he moved to Tartu, took Estonian citizenship, and built the Baltic region's only specialist neurological and neurosurgical centre. His work on brain tumours, ventriculography and intracranial pressure earned international notice, and Puusepp's sign is named for him. He died in Tartu in 1942.