• historical note
• Pick’s disease

Arnold Pick (1851–1924)¹ was born of German-Jewish parents on 20 July 1851 in Velké Mezirici, in Moravia.² He studied medicine in Vienna, where Theodore Meynert (1833–1892) stimulated his neurological interests. As with many medical scholars of his time, he was trained in clinical neurology, psychiatry, and neuropathology, a wide spectrum of disciplines now seldom feasible. In 1874 he trained in Berlin with Westphal, and from 1875 he worked at the later infamous asylum of Wehnen. Then he became lecturer in neurology and psychiatry in Prague where he met Otto Kahler, with whom he published papers on oculomotor palsies, cortical localisation, and syringomyelia. They established ‘Kahler-Pick’s law’—incoming fibres in …