Josef Gerstmann

Josef Gerstmann was a Jewish Austrian-born American neurologist, born in Lemberg in 1887 and died in New York City in 1969. He studied medicine at the Medical University in Vienna between 1906 and 1912, served as a sanitary officer in the First World War, and afterwards worked at the Vienna clinic for psychiatry and neurology alongside Julius Wagner-Jauregg. After becoming a professor he headed the Neurological Institute Maria-Theresien-Schlössel in Vienna from 1930. Because he was Jewish he left Austria with his wife Martha in 1938 to escape the Nazi Anschluss and settled in the United States, where he worked at hospitals in Ohio and Washington before moving to New York in 1941 as a research associate at the New York Neurological Institute and attending neuropsychiatrist at Goldwater Memorial Hospital. He also kept a private practice and held honorary membership in several American professional societies. Two conditions, Gerstmann syndrome and Gerstmann-Sträussler-Scheinker syndrome, carry his name, and his published work ran from spinal cord pathology and malaria treatment of general paralysis to finger agnosia and disorders of the body image.