After serving in the war, he returned to the Allerheiligen Hospital and worked in the psychiatric department as an assistant under Professor Heinrich Neumann.

[citation needed] Neumann sent him to Vienna for six months to study with neuropathologist Theodor Meynert,[4][3] who would have a profound influence upon Wernicke's career.

In 1875, Wernicke was appointed the first assistant in the Charité in Berlin under Karl Westphal, where he stayed until 1878 studying psychiatry and nervous diseases.

[5] Wernicke was heavily inspired by the research on language and communication coming from Paris, France, specifically from Paul Pierre Broca.

Wernicke began to question the relationship between dysphasia and the location of lesions that caused brain damage resulting in language problems.

The area affecting sensory aphasia would still function, so a patient could hypothetically retain comprehension of oral speech and silent reading.

However, the connection to Broca's area would be broken, causing prevention of effective translation of mental processes into verbal speech.

Ludwig Lichtheim, a professor of medicine at Bern University Hospital, wrote his work "Über Aphasie," which was influenced by Broca, Wernicke and Adolf Kussmaul.

Although the theory itself is not supported in modern nosology and etiology, it does have a general influence in psychopharmacology practices with its notion of a target symptom.

Lastly, Wernicke preserved traditional German psychiatry and described clinical vignettes, being unable to distinguish between physical and psychological causes of symptoms instead of using Kraepelin's approach of delineation of syndromes and disorders.

[5] Conference proceedings from Breslau were published in the Allgemeine Zeitschrift fur Psychiatrie und Psychische-Gerichtliche Medizin.