Felix Stern was the leading German specialist in encephalitis lethargica . No national statistics for this disease, first described in Vienna in 1916, were kept in Germany. For this reason, the data collected by Stern at the University Nerve Clinic in Göttingen, both in the first edition of 1922 and the enlarged second edition of 1928, is fundamental as a record of the epidemic that ended in 1926 in Germany. Stern estimated that at least 60,000 people contracted the disease in Germany.