Abstract
GUSTAV THEODOR FRITSCH, a pioneer in the physiology of the brain and one of the last great personalities of the classic period of German medicine, was born on March 5, 1838. He received his medical education at the Universities of Berlin, Breslau and Heidelberg under Helmholtz, Peters, Traube, Frerichs and Langenbeck among others, and qualified with a thesis on the central nervous system in 1862. He then spent three years in extensive foreign travel. In South Africa he made a study of the anatomy and physiology of the natives. He then visited Aden, where he studied eclipses and passed on to Upper Egypt, where he made some important anthropological and ethnographical investigations. On his return to Germany he devoted himself to the study of diatoms and electric fishes, and in 1868 was made assistant to Prof. Reichert at the Berlin Anatomical Institute. His chief achievement was the discovery in 1870 in collaboration with Hitzig of the motor centres of the cerebral convex and their excitability by the faradic current, which formed one of the landmarks in the history of physiology. In 1908, at the age of seventy years, he published a remarkable work on the comparative racial morphology of the human retina, illustrated by plates prepared from photomicrographs, in which, as in scientific photography generally, he had always shown a keen interest. His death took place on June 12, 1927.
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Gustav Fritsch (1838–1927). Nature 141, 403–404 (1938). https://doi.org/10.1038/141403c0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/141403c0