He was born in a large village in central Russia in 1854 (now known as Gus‘-Khrustalny near Moscow). His father was a manager at the glass factory, his mother was a homemaker. On finishing school––the Moscow gymnasium––at the age of 16, he enrolled in the medical faculty of Moscow University.
While studying medicine at Moscow University, Korsakoff showed much interest in problems of natural science and philosophy, in addition to the regular curriculum. Later he wrote “of all medical sciences Psychiatry stands much closer to the philosophical questions.”
By 1875 he was a physician at the Moscow Preobrazhenskij mental hospital and 1 year later he joined the department of nervous and mental diseases, headed by Aleksey Yakovlevich Kozhevnikov.
Korsakoff is best known for his work detailing the cognitive and physical effects of chronic alcoholism. His thesis ‘‘About alcoholic paralysis’’ gained him his medical doctorate in 1887. He found that many alcoholics demonstrated evidence of polyneuritis (e.g., muscular weakness and pain, staggering gait) as well as profound memory impairments and confabulation. Although others had previously described some of these same symptoms, Korsakoff realized the cognitive and physical symptoms were characteristic of a single disease.
Later on, in 1889 he published his work “Several Cases of a Particular Cerebropathia and Polyneuritis.” This illness, he thought, was a form of acute alcoholic encephalopathy, usually developing after an atypical alcoholic delirium.
Korsakoff wrote a Course of Psychiatry published only a year after his death. After two heart attacks at the age of 44, he consulted a specialist in Vienna in 1898 who established the diagnosis hypertrophy of the heart, associated with obesity and myocarditis. He died in 1900 from heart failure, at the age of 46.
Sergei Korsakoff: Russian neuropsychiatris
