Adolf Strümpell

Ernst Adolf Gustav Gottfried Strümpell, known as von Strümpell from 1893, was a Baltic German neurologist, born on 29 June 1853 in Neu-Autz in Courland, today Jaunauce in Latvia, the son of the philosopher Ludwig Strümpell. He studied at Dorpat and Leipzig and received his medical doctorate from the University of Leipzig in 1875. He became an associate professor at Leipzig in 1883, a full professor at Erlangen from 1886 to 1903, where he directed the medical clinic, and then held chairs at Breslau from 1903, Vienna from 1909 and Leipzig from 1910, where he was appointed rector in 1915. Together with the French neurologist Pierre Marie he is credited with identifying the arthritic spinal deformity known as Marie-Strümpell disease, ankylosing spondylitis, and with Maurice Lorrain he gave his name to Strümpell-Lorrain disease, a hereditary spastic paraplegia. His 1884 textbook of internal medicine, the Lehrbuch der speziellen Pathologie und Therapie der inneren Krankheiten, ran to more than thirty editions and was translated into English in 1887; its neurological volume guided the training of neurologists for decades. He died on 10 January 1925.