Unknown (picture taken around 1940s) · Public domain

Alexander Luria is widely credited as the father of modern neuropsychology, building a battery of clinical tests from his wartime work with brain-injured Soviet soldiers that clinicians still use in some form today. His textbook Higher Cortical Functions in Man (1962) mapped how specific brain regions integrate into unified mental activity, and his case studies The Mind of a Mnemonist and The Man with a Shattered World turned two individual patients — one with unlimited memory, one with a shattered brain — into landmark accounts of how the mind actually works.