Oswald Berkhan

Oswald Berkhan (19 March 1834 to 15 February 1917) was a German physician, born in Blankenburg am Harz, who died in Braunschweig. He was one of the initiators of the Idioten-Anstalt Neuerkerode, an institution for people with mental illnesses that was meant to be a sanctuary for disabled and ill people, and he was a dedicated reformer of special education schools. He is credited as the first person to identify dyslexia, in 1881, although the term was coined several years later, in 1887, by the Stuttgart ophthalmologist Rudolf Berlin. His publications include a contribution to the history of psychiatry on the care of the mentally ill in Braunschweig (1863) and works on disorders of speech and written language (1889). An accessibility technology company founded in 2016, Oswald Foundation, is named after him.