Ludwig Merzbacher

Ludwig Merzbacher (February 9, 1875 - October 30, 1942) was a German neuropathologist and psychiatrist who was born in Florence, Italy.

In 1900 he received his medical doctorate from the University of Strassburg, and remained in Strassburg as an assistant at the physiological institute. Afterwards he worked at psychiatric clinics in Freiburg (1902-04) and Heidelberg (1904-06), and in 1906 was habilitated for psychiatry at the University of Tübingen. From 1906 until 1910 he worked at the psychiatric clinic in Tübingen, where he was an assistant to Robert Gaupp (1870-1953). During this period of time he also spent several months performing research at Alois Alzheimer's laboratory in Munich.

In 1910 Merzbacher moved to Argentina, where he was appointed head of the laboratory in the psychiatric clinic at Buenos Aires. From 1914 to 1919 he was in charge of the department of pathological anatomy of the "Clínica Modelö" in Buenos Aires, and beginning in 1924 was chief physician at the "German hospital" in Buenos Aires.

He is remembered for his pathological studies of a dysmyelinating central nervous system disorder that is now referred to as Pelizaeus-Merzbacher disease (PMD). This eponymous disease is named along with German balneologist Friedrich Christoph Pelizaeus (1851-1942). Merzbacher described his research of the disorder in a 1910 paper titled "Eine eigenartige familiärhereditäre Erkrankungform".

References

* [http://www.whonamedit.com/doctor.cfm/16.html "Ludwig Merzbacher"] @ Who Named It
* [http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/8520731 NCBI, Ludwig Merzbacher (1875-1942): the man behind the disease]