Louis A. Gottschalk

Who was Louis A. Gottschalk?

Louis A. Gottschalk was an American psychiatrist and neuroscientist.

Gottschalk earned his M.D. at Washington University in St. Louis in 1943 and his Ph.D. from Southern California Psychoanalytic Institute in 1977.

He was the founding chairman of the Department of Psychiatry and Human Behavior at University of California Irvine College of Medicine.

He gained national prominence by announcing in 1987 that Ronald Reagan had been suffering from diminished mental ability as early as 1980. He came to this conclusion by using the Gottschalk-Gleser scales, an internationally used diagnostic tool he helped develop for charting impairments in brain function, to measure speech patterns in Reagan's 1980 and 1984 presidential debates.

Gottschalk coinvented software that uncovered a link between childhood attention deficit disorder and adult addiction to alcohol and drugs. In 2004, at age 87, he published his last book, World War II: Neuropsychiatric Casualties, Out of Sight, Out of Mind.

In 2006, his son filed a suit alleging that Gottschalk had lost millions of dollars in a 419 scam.

Gottschalk died at his home on November 27, 2008.