Arnold Pick

Arnold Pick (1851-1924) was a German-speaking psychiatrist born in the Austro-Hungarian Empire, in what is now the Czech Republic. He is best remembered for first describing the clinical features of frontotemporal dementia, work he carried out between 1892 and 1906, and for leading a neuropathological school in Prague. Together with the school in Munich, where Alois Alzheimer worked, it shaped the study of Alzheimer's disease in the early twentieth century.

He trained in Berlin under Karl Friedrich Otto Westphal and later worked at the asylum in Wehnen. His interests centred on disturbances of language and memory. He was the first to name reduplicative paramnesia and the second to use the term dementia praecox, in 1891, before Kraepelin gave it wider currency. His major publications include studies of the pathology of the central nervous system, work on language comprehension, and a book on agrammatic speech disorders, alongside some 350 shorter papers.

Pick believed that mental illnesses should be studied through concrete brain lesions that could be observed at autopsy, not through symptoms alone. This anatomoclinical approach defined his school. Over time the name Pick's disease came to be reserved for the behavioural variant of frontotemporal dementia, marked by the Pick bodies and Pick cells that Alzheimer described in 1911. His lasting influence lies in the distinction between degenerative conditions now grouped under frontotemporal dementias.