PIONEERS IN NEUROLOGY

Owing to advances in the understanding of neurophysio-logical responses to high-stress situations, post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) has become a topic of widespread attention in recent years. While anthropologist Allan Young depicts PTSD as an ‘‘invented’ ’ product of con-temporary psychiatric approaches, this deviates slightly from scholarship that holds that PTSD-like conditions preceded the American Psychiatric Association’s accep-tance of the very notion in DSM III (1980) [10]. What appears as a contemporary phenomenon is the intensifying debate surrounding the socio-ethical ramifications of neu-rological and psychiatric assessments of PTSD within judicial proceedings related to financial compensation claims [4]. However, German neurologist and psychiatrist Walther Riese’s (1890–1976) efforts to assist the claims o