Charles Karsner Mills, M.D. was an American physician and a pioneer in neurology. He founded the first neurology department in a general hospital in the United States at the Philadelphia General Hospital in 1877 and served as chief of neurology at the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania. He was a professor of neurology at the University of Pennsylvania from 1877 to 1915. He founded the Philadelphia Polyclinic and taught there as professor of diseases of the mind and nervous system from 1883 to 1898. He led major reforms to psychiatric hospitals in the Philadelphia area including the closing of the Blockley Almshouse and the construction of the Philadelphia General Hospital and Byberry Hospital for Mental Diseases. He published over 300 scientific papers on neurology topics including cerebral localization, electrotherapeutics, aphasias and the effects of tumors in the central nervous system. In 1900, he first described a case of ascending paralysis, a rare motor neuron condition that has become known as Mills' syndrome.