Julius Althaus

Julius Althaus
Born	Julius Althaus 31 March 1833 Lippe-Detmold
Died	11 June 1900 (aged 67) London
Nationality	German
Occupation	Physician
Spouse(s)	Anna Wilhelmina Pelzer
Children	3
Parent(s)	Georg Friedrich Althaus (father) Julie Draeseke (mother)
Relatives	Caroline Elisabeth Althaus (sister) Theodor Althaus (brother) Friedrich Althaus (brother) Bernhard Althaus (brother)

Julius Althaus (31 March 1833 – 11 June 1900) was a German-English physician. He conducted early electrical treatment of patients at King's College Hospital and he was mainly instrumental in creating the Maida Vale Hospital for Nervous Diseases.

Born in Lippe-Detmold, Germany, on 31 March 1833, Althaus was the fourth and youngest son of Friedrich Althaus and Julie Draescke. His father was general superintendent of Lippe-Detmold, a Protestant dignity equal to the Anglican rural dean; his mother was a daughter of the last Protestant bishop of Magdeburg. He received his classical education at the University of Bonn, and began his medical studies at Göttingen in 1851 continuing in Heidelberg and graduated M.D. at Berlin in 1855, with a thesis de Pneumothorace. He then visited Sicily with Professor Johannes Peter Müller to study zoology. He worked under Professor Jean Martin Charcot in Paris.

Althaus moved to London, where as an assistant to Robert Bentley Todd he carried out the treatment of patients at King's College Hospital using electricity. In 1866, he was largely responsible for creating the Hospital for Epilepsy and Paralysis. This facility in Regent's Park later became the Maida Vale Hospital for Nervous Diseases and it is now part of National Hospital for Neurology and Neurosurgery. In 1877, Althaus unsuccessfully tried to rename the disease multiple sclerosis "Charcot's disease" after the disease's first descriptor, Jean-Martin Charcot. He gave two lectures on spinal cord sclerosis in 1884 and noted that the meaning of the term "sclerosis" varied from country to country.

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