Teofil Simchowicz

Teofil Simchowicz (3 June 1879 – 31 December 1957) was a Polish neurologist who was born in Ciechanowiec, near Bialystok, Poland. He studied medicine at the Imperial University of Warsaw, and received a medical degree in 1905. He worked under the founder of modern Polish school of neurology, Edward Flatau (1868-1932). It was Flatau who encouraged him to join Alois Alzheimer (1864-1915) in Munich. Simchowicz focused his research on the neuropathological changes in dementia. He emigrated with his wife to Palestine during the world war II, where he continued to work as a consulting neurologist. Simchowicz coined the terms senile plaques, senile index, and granulovacuolar degeneration – discovered in the hippocampus in patients with Alzheimer’s disease, and described the nasomental reflex. Simchowicz was a prolific researcher in the field of neuropathology, especially neurodegeneration but also in clinical neurology.