Oskar Kohnstamm

Dr Oskar Kohnstamm (1871-1917) was a German neurologist and psychiatrist. Initially trained in internal medicine in Giessen and Strassbourg he received his doctors degree in Berlin in 1894. Kohnstamm then began as a general practitioner in Königstein im Taunus, a small town in Hesse. There, he became more and more interested in neurology and psychiatry. His wife, Eva Grad, daughter of one of Kohnstamm's Berlin professors, agreed to have occasionally depressive patients as guests in the house, who then got chores assigned in housekeeping, gardening or minding the children. Gradually, the idea ripened to build a small sanatorium for treating clinical depressions. The house, build in Jugendstil style, opened in 1905 and was expanded in 1912. Kohnstamm was no follower of Sigmund Freud but worked often with hypnosis. Among his patients were two young men who would become world-famous: the painter Ernst Ludwig Kirchner (1880-1938) and the conductor Otto Klemperer (1885-1973).