Carl Wernicke is best known to speech-language pathologists for his study of aphasia and for his discovery of the area in the cerebrum responsible for receptive language/speech phenomena in the superior gyrus of the temporal lobe.
Carl Wernicke was born in 1848 in Tarnowitz/Tarnowskie Góry, now in Poland but then part of Prussia, into modest circumstances. His father, a clerical assistant in the Prussian mining administration of Lower Silesia, died when his son was still a young man. Wernicke studied medicine in Breslau/ Wrocław and earned his medical degree in 1870 and stayed on to work with Heinrich Neumann, associate professor of psychiatry.
He collected a number of supporting cases from the wards of the All Saints Hospital and published a monograph of 72 pages: The Aphasia Symptom Complex (Wernicke 1874). In a small book published in 1874, Wernicke tried to relate the various aphasias to impaired psychic processes in different regions of the brain.
Carl Wernicke was the first discovered Wernicke area. It has been identified as 1 of 2 areas found in the cerebral cortex that manages speech. Wernicke area is located in Brodmann area 22, the posterior segment of the superior temporal gyrus in the dominant hemisphere.
Virtually, overnight, Wernicke assumed a leading role in aphasia research. The success of his book created an opportunity for Wernicke to join the department of psychiatry and nervous diseases of the Berlin Charité Hospital under Karl Westphal.
From 1876 to 1885, Wernicke made his living as a practicing neurologist in Berlin. During his time in private practice, he produced various neurological papers, including the description of the hemianopic pupillary response and wrote a well-received Textbook of Brain Diseases (Wernicke 1881). In this work, based on careful case studies, Wernicke attempted to relate all known neurological diseases to specific regions of the brain.
Between 1890 and 1904 he was a Chairman of the Department of Neurology and Psychiatry, University of Breslau.
Carl Wernicke - German psychiatrist and neurologist
