James W. Papez

James W. Papez (born August 18, 1883 in Glencoe , Minnesota , † April 13, 1958 in New York ) was an American neuroanatomist .

Papez was born in 1883 as the son of Czech immigrants. He studied medicine at the University of Minnesota (MD 1911). In the same year he became a professor at the Medical College of Atlanta . From 1920 he taught at Cornell University in Ithaca (New York). In 1929 he wrote his textbook Comparative Neuroanatomy .

In 1937 Papez proposed a general mechanism for emotions , the so-called Papez circle , in which the hippocampus played a major role. In 1949 Paul MacLean Papez completed and corrected ideas and named the larger complex the Limbic System .