Paul Bucy

Paul Bucy (November 13, 1904 – September 22, 1992) was an American neuropathologist who was a native of Hubbard, Iowa.

He studied medicine at the University of Iowa, and afterwards was an assistant to neurosurgeon Percival Bailey (1892-1973) at the University of Chicago. In the early 1930s he traveled to Europe, and studied with Gordon Morgan Holmes (1876-1965) in London and Otfrid Foerster (1874-1941) in Breslau. In 1941, he became Professor of Neurology and Neurological Surgery at the University of Illinois in Chicago, and during World War II was a medical consultant to the U.S. Army.

From 1954 to 1972, Bucy was a professor of neurosurgery at Northwestern University in Chicago, IL, and afterwards was appointed Professor of Neurology and Neurological surgery at Bowman Gray School of Medicine in Winston-Salem. In 1972 he created the journal "Surgical Neurology", and was its editor until 1987.

Paul Bucy is remembered for his work with experimental psychologist Heinrich Klüver (1897-1979) involving the eponymous Klüver-Bucy syndrome, which is a behavioral disorder caused by malfunction of the left and right medial temporal lobes of the brain. The two men were able to clincically reproduce this disorder in rhesus monkeys by performing bilateral temporal lobectomies. Also, with Percival Bailey, he performed important research of brain tumors, particularly oligodendrogliomas and meningiomas.