Pioneers in Neurology

The nineteenth century witnessed some of the greatest neuroanatomists of all times. Amongst them is the largely forgotten Heinrich Sachs, a student of Carl Wernicke in Breslau. Sachs was a German neurologist, born in 1863 in Halberstadt a town in the German state of Saxony-Anhalt and the capital of the district of Harz. Despite his upbringing in a lower-income background, he was able to study medicine in Berlin where he graduated in 1885 with his doctoral thesis on amyotrophic lateral sclerosis. Thereafter, Sachs practised as a physician for some years before starting his specialisation within Carl Wernicke’s laboratory at the University Hospital of Breslau [1]. Sachs habilitated in 1897 in Psychiatry and Neurology with his work on the accruement of spatial perception through sensory impressions [2]. The most comprehensive information accessible today originates from Sachs’ personal files, which contain his signature (Fig. 1). These files enclose a reply to the demand of the principal of the royal university acting upon order of the royal ministry, which insisted that professors of their universities disclose their personal and professional relations. In this document, Sachs stated that his confession was Jewish-protestant and as a remark added that he was also working as specialist registrar at the hospital for accidents and emergencies. This position was to influence one of his last publications on traumatic neurosis [3]. Sachs was married with one child. His wife was brought up within an established merchant family in Breslau and