Josef Gerstmann

Josef Gerstmann (July 17, 1887, in Lemberg – March 23, 1969, in New York City) was a Jewish Austrian-born American neurologist.[1][2]

Josef Gerstmann, circa 1930 (Bildersammlung/Sammlungen der Medizinischen Universität Wien)

Gerstmann studied Medicine at the Medical University in Vienna, then capital of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, between 1906 and 1912 graduating in 1912. During World War I he served with distinction as the sanitary officer. Subsequently, he worked at the Clinic for Psychiatry-Neurology in Vienna with Wagner-Jauregg, and, after becoming Professor, he became the chief of Neurological Institute Maria-Theresien-Schlössel, Vienna in 1930. Being Jewish, he emigrated with his wife Martha to the United States in 1938, escaping the Nazi Anschluss.

Initially Gerstmann worked at the Springfield / Ohio State Hospital, and from 1940 to 1941 as a research assistant and as a consultant neurologist at St. Elisabeth Hospital in Washington. 1941 he moved to New York and became a research associate at the New York Neurological Institute and an attending neuropsychiatrist at Goldwater Memorial Hospital. Gerstmann opened a private practise at 240 Central Park South. He was named an honorary member of the American Psychiatric Association and Academy of Neurology, a member of the American Psychopathological Association, Psychotherapeutic Society, Pirquet Society and the Rudolf Virchow Society. Gerstmann died on March 23, 1969, in his New York apartment.

Gerstmann syndrome and Gerstmann-Sträussler-Scheinker syndrome are named after him.[3]