Oswald Bumke

Oswald Bumke (25 September 1877 to 5 January 1950) was a German psychiatrist and neurologist. He studied at Freiburg, Leipzig, Munich and Halle, and from 1901 worked at the Freiburg psychiatric clinic under Alfred Hoche, a critic of Emil Kraepelin's disease classification. His 1904 habilitation reviewed eye pupil abnormalities in neurological and psychiatric illness as possible diagnostic markers. He held chairs at Rostock from 1914 and Breslau from 1916, where he followed Alois Alzheimer, and in 1923 he spent seven weeks in Moscow as part of the team of specialists called to treat the ailing Lenin. In 1924 he succeeded Kraepelin as professor of psychiatry and director of the university clinic in Munich, becoming the most prominent psychiatrist in Germany, and he was rector of the university in 1928 and 1929. He doubted that dementia praecox was a natural disease entity, preferring to speak of syndromes, and he criticised psychoanalysis and the degeneration theory of Ernst Rudin. He edited major psychiatric handbooks.