Louis Jacobsohn-Lask

Who was Louis Jacobsohn-Lask?

Louis Jacobsohn-Lask was a German neurologist and neuroanatomist.

He studied medicine at the University of Berlin under Heinrich Wilhelm Waldeyer, Rudolf Virchow, Emil du Bois-Reymond, Ernst Viktor von Leyden and Robert Koch. In 1899 Jacobsohn and Edward Flatau wrote Handbuch der Anatomie und vergleichenden Anatomie des Centralnervensystems der Säugetiere, which included one of first attempts to classify sulci and gyri of human brain cortex. In 1904 he wrote, together with Flatau and Lazar Minor, another monograph, Handbuch der pathologischen Anatomie der Nervensystems. He described a finger flexion reflex called the Bekhterev-Jacobsohn reflex or Jacobsohn reflex.

In 1936 he emigrated with his wife Berta Jacobsohn-Lask, a communist of Jewish origin, to the Soviet Union, where he was encouraged to continue his scientific work. They settled in Sevastopol, where Louis Jacobsohn-Lask died in 1941.