Oppenheim

Oppenheim Hermann (Hermann Oppenheim, 1858-1919), famous German neurologist. From 1882 he worked as an assistant in the clinic of Westphal, and after Westphal's death (1890) continued to work in Berlin, never having his own clinic during his lifetime, as despite numerous representations from the faculty, the ministry refused Oppenheim a chair due to nationalist and religious considerations. Oppenheim's works are numerous and concern various fields of clinical neurology. He made many new contributions to the study of cerebrospinal syphilis, tabes dorsalis, multiple sclerosis, encephalitis, polyneuritis, and tumors of the brain and spinal cord, the surgical treatment of which owes its success in large measure to the joint work of Oppenheim with Bergmann, Krause, and Borchhardt. The name of Oppenheim is closely associated with the doctrine of bulbar paralysis without an anatomical substrate, the doctrine of dystonia musculorum deformans, and the doctrine of pseudosclerosis. Myatonia congenita was first described by Oppenheim and bears the name of Oppenheim's disease. In the field of functional diseases of the nervous system, Oppenheim paid particular attention to traumatic neurosis, especially during the years of the world war, which created a colossal epidemic of this disease. In contrast to most neurologists, who consider and have considered traumatic neurosis together with Charcot as a form of hysteria or neurasthenia, Oppenheim strongly defended the great importance of mechanical trauma along with emotional shock in its origin. Oppenheim's enormous clinical experience and teaching talent found brilliant expression in his famous textbook of nervous diseases ("Lehrbuch der Nervenkrankheiten". 1st ed., B., 1894; 7th ed., B., 1923), which went through 7 editions, was translated into many languages, including Russian (1897), and to this day retains first place among textbooks of clinical neurology.