Alfred Hauptmann
Alfred Hauptmann (born August 29, 1881 in Gleiwitz, Upper Silesia, died April 5, 1948 in Boston, Massachusetts) was a German-Jewish psychiatrist and neurologist. His most important contribution remained the article written in 1912 on the effectiveness of the phenobarbital as an anti-epileptic. After his emigration, he and the internist Siegfried Thannhauser, who had also emigrated, described an autosomal dominant inherited myopathy for the first time in 1941, which is now known as Hauptmann-Thannhauser muscular dystrophy. Life and work. Hauptmann's professional career was primarily determined by his time with the well-known neurologist Max Nonne  in Hamburg. During his life, Hauptmann's research focus was mainly on the neurological field. After working in Heidelberg and Hamburg, Hauptmann went to Freiburg University Hospital . There he completed his habilitation in 1912. His most famous work, "Luminal in Epilepsy", was published in that year. After taking part in the First World War, Hauptmann resumed his work at the University of Freiburg, where he received an extraordinary professorship in 1918 and was senior physician at the mental hospital there, before taking over the chair in Halle in 1926 . Hauptmann received the professorship for psychiatry at the University of Halle  in 1926. Until 1935 he worked as director of the psychiatric and mental hospital in Halle, had to give up his chair in the course of the Nazi discriminatory laws and end his work as a doctor. The path to emigration, ultimately triggered by the temporary imprisonment in the Dachau concentration camp, led via Switzerland and England to the USA. He got a job at the Joseph H. Pratt Diagnostic Hospital in Boston. Efforts with the help of the Rockefeller Foundation failed to find a position comparable to that he hold in Germany. Prize. The Alfred Hauptmann Prize for Epilepsy  Research has been awarded since 1979, jointly by the German and Austrian Societies for Epileptology and the Swiss Epilepsy League since 2009.