Theodor Meynert

Theodor Hermann Meynert (Dresden, 1833 – Klösterburg, near Vienna, 1892) was a physician, neuroanatomist and psychiatrist who became one of the leading figures of medicine in the Habsburg lands in the late nineteenth century. Born in Germany, he moved as a child to Vienna, where he studied medicine and turned early toward neurology and psychiatry. He held the chair of psychiatry from 1870, and his studies of brain anatomy helped secure the scientific reputation of the University of Vienna.

Meynert saw the brain as a set of functional areas linked by bundles of white matter. He also proposed a classification of mental illness grounded in its anatomical and pathological correlates, a scheme that divided his colleagues. He believed that disturbances in brain development could predispose someone to mental illness, and that some psychoses could be reversible. His larger goal was to place psychiatry on an anatomical footing as an exact science.

His pupils included Paul Flechsig, Carl Wernicke and Auguste Forel. Some of them opposed his ideas sharply, yet Sigmund Freud acknowledged how deeply he shaped neuroscience and the link between brain and thought. Meynert later distanced himself from Freud over the latter's interest in hypnosis, though the two reconciled shortly before Meynert's death. His legacy lives on in neuroanatomy and in the idea that brain structure bears on mental life.