Sachs, Bernard

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SACHS, BERNARD

SACHS, BERNARD (1858–1944), U.S. neurologist. Sachs, who was born in Baltimore, belonged to the *Sachs family of scholars. He studied medicine in Europe and, when he returned to the U.S., became professor of nervous and mental diseases at the New York Polyclinic and professor of clinical neurology at Columbia University. He was president of the First International Neurological Congress which was held in 1931. Sachs, a pioneer in the field of child neurology, is best known for his description of the Tay-Sachs disease in children – a progressive impairment of mental functions, muscles, and vision ending in blindness. He made various studies on nervous disorders in children and published several books on the subject, among them: A Treatise on the Nervous Diseases of Children (1895, 19052); The Normal (1925); and Puberty and Adolescence (1936).

bibliography:

S.R. Kagan, Jewish Medicine (1952), 384.

[Suessmann Muntner]