Carl Wernicke

Carl Wernicke (born May 15, 1848, Tarnowitz, Pol., Prussia—died June 15, 1905, Thüringer Wald, Ger.) was a German neurologist who related nerve diseases to specific areas of the brain. He is best known for his descriptions of the aphasias, disorders interfering with the ability to communicate in speech or writing.

Wernicke studied medicine at the University of Breslau and did graduate work at Breslau, Berlin, and Vienna before entering practice in Berlin. In 1885 he joined the faculty at Breslau, where he remained until 1904.

In a small book published in 1874, Wernicke tried to relate the various aphasias to impaired psychic processes in different regions of the brain; the book included the first accurate description of a sensory aphasia located in the temporal lobe. Wernicke also demonstrated the dominance of one hemisphere in brain functions in these studies. His Lehrbuch der Gehirnkrankheiten (1881; “Textbook of Brain Disorders”) is an attempt to comprehensively account for the cerebral localization of all neurologic disease. Some nerve disorders were described in that work for the first time; one of them is Wernicke’s encephalopathy, caused by a thiamine deficiency.