Oskar Panizza

Oskar Panizza (1853 to 1921) was a German physician, psychiatrist and writer, born in Bad Kissingen. He studied medicine in Munich, took his doctorate in 1880 with a thesis on myelin, pigment, epithelia and micrococci in sputum, and from 1882 worked as an assistant at the Upper Bavarian asylum under Bernhard von Gudden, studying the human brain. He left in 1884, practised as a doctor from 1885, and then, fearing for his own sanity, turned wholly to literature. His satires and his play Das Liebeskonzil, which portrays syphilis as a punishment sent on a sinful church hierarchy, led to a one-year prison sentence in 1895 and later exile in Zurich and Paris. Examined psychiatrically in 1901 and diagnosed with paranoia, he was declared legally incapable in 1905 and lived in a private sanatorium in Bayreuth from 1906 until his death in 1921.