Josef Breuer

Josef Breuer was born in Vienna in 1842, the son of Leopold Breuer, who taught religion in the city's Jewish community. His mother died when he was young, and he was raised by his grandmother and educated by his father until he was eight. He studied medicine at the University of Vienna and passed his examinations in 1867. Working with Ewald Hering, he showed the role of the vagus nerve in controlling breathing, a mechanism now called the Hering–Breuer reflex. In 1873, independently of the physicist Ernst Mach, he discovered how the semicircular canals of the inner ear sense movement and balance. Breuer had a large private medical practice. In the early 1880s he treated a young woman, Bertha Pappenheim, known in the case history as Anna O., whose symptoms eased when she talked about them; she called the treatment the 'talking cure'. Breuer was a mentor to the young Sigmund Freud, and in 1895 the two published Studies on Hysteria, a founding work of psychoanalysis, though they later parted ways. Breuer died in Vienna in 1925.

Josef Breuer is also an author in the library: author page and works.

Faith: Born into a Jewish family; his father taught religion in Vienna's Jewish community. Source: Wikipedia