Sigbert Josef Maria Ganser

Sigbert Josef Maria Ganser (1853 to 1931) was a German psychiatrist, born in Rhaunen in the Rhine Province. He took his medical doctorate at the University of Munich in 1876, worked briefly at a psychiatric clinic in Wurzburg, and then assisted the neuroanatomist Bernhard von Gudden in Munich. In 1886 he became head of the psychiatric department at the Dresden General Hospital, where his students included the neurologist Hans Queckenstedt. He is remembered for a hysterical disorder he first described in 1898 after observing three prisoners at a prison in Halle, marked by approximate or nonsensical answers to simple questions, perceptual abnormalities and clouding of consciousness. Ganser read these symptoms as an unconscious attempt to escape an intolerable situation, and the condition became known as Ganser syndrome.