Carl Friedrich Otto Westphal

Karl Friedrich Otto Westphal (23 March 1833, in Berlin – 27 January 1890, in Kreuzlingen) was a German psychiatrist from Berlin. He was the son of Otto Carl Friedrich Westphal (1800–1879) and Karoline Friederike Heine and the father of Alexander Karl Otto Westphal (1863-1941). He was married to Klara, daughter of the banker Alexander Mendelssohn.

After receiving his doctorate, he worked at the Berlin Charité, and subsequently became an assistant in the department for the mentally ill under Wilhelm Griesinger (1817–1868) and Karl Wilhelm Ideler (1795–1860). In 1869 he became an associate professor of psychiatry, as well as a clinical instructor in the department for mental and nervous diseases, In 1874 he attained the title of full professor of psychiatry.

Westphal's contributions to medical science are many; in 1871 he coined the term "agoraphobia", when he observed that three male patients of his displayed extreme anxiety and feelings of dread when they had to enter certain public areas of the city. He is credited with providing an early diagnosis of "pseudosclerosis", a disease known today as hepatolenticular degeneration. He also demonstrated a relationship between tabes dorsalis (nerve degeneration in the spinal cord) and paralysis in the mentally insane.

Westphal is credited with describing a deep tendon reflex anomaly in tabes dorsalis that later became known as the "Erb–Westphal symptom" (named with neurologist Wilhelm Heinrich Erb (1840–1921). His name is also shared with neurologist Ludwig Edinger (1855–1918) regarding the Edinger–Westphal nucleus, which is an accessory nucleus of the oculomotor nerve (cranial nerve number III; CN III). He was the first physician to provide a clinical description of narcolepsy and cataplexy (1877). French physician Jean-Baptiste-Édouard Gélineau (1828–1906), also described the two maladies, coining the term narcolepsie in 1880.

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