Johannes Schenck von Grafenberg

Johannes Schenck von Grafenberg (Latin Ioannes Schenckius; * 20 or June 21, 1530 in Grafenberg in Württemberg, † November 12, 1598 in Freiburg im Breisgau) was an influential German physician of the late Renaissance and was one of the pioneers of Neurolinguistics.

Life and work

Schenck von Grafenberg studied at the University of Würzburg, among others, with Jakob Degen and Leonhart Fuchs and received a doctorate in 1554. After that, he was briefly active in Strasbourg as a practicing physician as soon in the town doctor in Freiburg Breisgau. His studies of neuro- traumatic speech disorders were in the 16th century as indicative. 1584 he sat for the first time an artificial respiration. In the same year he published his personal and the observations of colleagues to language disorders in the treatise Observationes medicae de capite humano. His most famous work is the seven-volume compendium observationum medicarum rariorum, libri VII with descriptions of pathological symptoms in the entire human body. It also included a description of the bubble column, the 1597 described Schenck von Grafenberg first.

His son Johann Georg Schenck von Grafenberg was also physicians.