page_title: Leo Sternbach
section_title: Background and family
hierarchical_section_title: Leo Sternbach / Background and family
caption_attribution_description: House in Opatija, Croatia, where Leo Sternbach spent his youth. He was a chemist, inventor of Valium (diazepam, a very widely used psychotropic medication used to control anxiety, psychomotor agitation, seizures, etc.).
context_page_description: Leo Sternbach was an Austrian chemist who is credited with first synthesizing benzodiazepines, the main class of tranquilizers.
context_section_description: Sternbach was born on May 7, 1908, in Opatija, to an upper middle class Jewish family. He had a younger brother, Giusi. His father Michael Abracham Sternbach was from the Polish city of Przemyśl in Galicia (then part of Austria-Hungary), and his mother Piroska (née Cohn) Sternbach was from Orosháza, Hungary. Sternbach's parents met and married in Opatija where they both lived. The family lived in modest conditions, in a rented four-room apartment on the third floor of the "Vila Jadran" (Villa Adriatic), near the pharmacy owned by Sternbach's father. Sternbach attended a private German school in Opatija until it was closed in 1920, and—since he could not speak Italian—continued his schooling in Villach, Graz, and Bielitz. In 1926, Sternbach moved with his family to Krakow, Poland. In the same year, his younger brother died of scarlet fever, at the age of fifteen.
caption: Villa Adriatic where Leo Sternbach spent his childhood in Opatija, Croatia
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