Erwin Gustav Niessl von Mayendorf (1873–1943)

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Niessl von Mayendorf was born in Brno on 20 July 1873 [2, 9]. Intellectually mentored by his father, vice-chancellor of Brno technical college, and trained at the local grammar school, he studied medicine and philosophy in Berlin and Vienna and obtained a doctorate in both subjects. Niessl von Mayendorf visited Leipzig, probably for the first time, in October 1900, where he applied for an assistantship at the university’s psychiatric and neurological hospital. Its director, Paul Flechsig, was to become the young brain researcher’s mentor, to whom he eagerly returned in 1908 after studies in Breslau and Halle (with Carl Wernicke), Munich and Hamburg. Under Flechsig's guidance he qualified as a university lecturer, his second thesis being on amnesia. Unfortunately, as a citizen of the Austrian Hungarian Empire he faced the unsatisfactory situation of not being allowed to practice in Germany until 1913. Hence he primarily undertook research at Flechsig’s laboratory for brain anatomy until World War I, when his homeland required his services as a neurologist and chief of the military hospital in Brno. He made an impact at that time with his works on forms of tremors and epilepsy in the army, tactile blindness and amnesia following gunshot wounds, injuries in the parietal area and somatoform disorders such as hysterical paraplegia after gunshots and trembling in front-line soldiers; subsequently these works have been rather neglected by researchers. After the end of World War I, he returned to Leipzig, where Flechsig made him head of the brain research laboratory and he was finally allowed to open his private practice. In pursuit of his scientific ambitions he published a total of more than 120 papers, mostly on brain anatomy, localization of language in the brain [4, 6] or chorea [7], but also on psychiatric issues. This finally led to his appointment in 1925 as associate professor for psychiatry and neurology. Throughout his life he was especially concerned with aphasia [3, 5], in the historiography of which he has not been acknowledged as much as Broca, Wernicke, Marie or Goldstein. One factor may have been a certain neglect of German science by other European countries in that era [8]. A second reason may have been Niessl von Mayendorf’s central theory of right-brain language function, according to which most aphasic symptoms were caused by the right brain intervening in case of injuries to the left hemisphere. Recently however, the importance of the right hemisphere in functional reorganisation and compensation after brain injuries has again come under attention [1], partly through modern imaging methods. …