Theodor Meynert

Theodor Hermann Meynert (1833 to 1892) was a German-Austrian psychiatrist, neuropathologist and anatomist, born in Dresden. He took his medical doctorate at the University of Vienna in 1861 and in 1875 became director of the psychiatric clinic associated with that university. Meynert held that disturbances in brain development could predispose a person to psychiatric illness and that certain psychoses are reversible, and he aimed to establish psychiatry as an exact science grounded in anatomy. His work on the cellular architecture of the cerebral cortex is why he is often considered the founder of cortical cytoarchitectonics. His students in Vienna included Josef Breuer, Sigmund Freud, Julius Wagner-Jauregg and, elsewhere, Sergei Korsakoff and Carl Wernicke.