Gustav Fritsch

Gustav Theodor Fritsch ( born March 5, 1838 in Cottbus, † June 12, 1927 in Berlin) was a German anatomist, anthropologist and physiologist.

Life

Fritsch was a son of the Commissioner of City Planning Ludwig Fritsch and his wife Sophie Kramsta. He attended from 1849 to Mary Magdalene Gymnasium in Breslau. After high school he studied 1857-1862 in Berlin, Breslau and Heidelberg first natural sciences, medicine later. As a young man he spent 1863-1866 for three years in South Africa and later published several writings on the African ethnic groups and the electric organs of the electric eel Gymnotus electricus. He emigrated from Cape Town in the Western and Eastern provinces, the Orange Free State, Natal and Bechuanaland.

In 1868 he accompanied the expedition to observe the solar eclipse of August 18, 1868 Aden and went from there to Egypt, where he accompanied John Dümichen on an archaeological and photographic expedition. In 1874 he went to observe the transit of Venus to Isfahan in Persia (see picture) and then to zoological purposes on a journey to Asia Minor. 1881-1882 Fritsch traveled on behalf of the Royal Academy of Sciences Egypt and the eastern Mediterranean countries to the study of electricity in fish.

In 1867 Fritsch assistant at the Anatomical Institute, 1874 finally associate professor of physiology at the University of Berlin. An outstanding anthropologist he also found recognition of Rudolf Virchow. Later he became head of the histological section of the Physiological Institute. There, his main interest was the study of the motor functions of the brain and its localization. His works, which he wrote after experimental electrical stimulation of the frontal lobe of dogs together with Eduard Hitzig in 1870, are considered first descriptive localization doctrine of the motor cortex.

After the war, Fritsch married in Wroclaw Helene (1851-1915), a daughter of the publisher Ferdinand Hirt. With her he had a daughter and a son.

Little known is that Fritsch with his work The retina elements and the three-color theory is one of the pioneers of color photography. Gustav Theodor Fritsch died at the age of 89 years in Berlin.

Fritsch belonged in 1869 to the founding members of the Berlin Society for Anthropology, Ethnology and Prehistory.

Works

  • Three years in South Africa. Travel sketches compiled from notes of the diary. Hirt, Wroclaw 1868
  • Eduard Hitzig with: Concerning the electrical excitability of the cerebrum. In: Archives of Anatomy, Physiology and scientific medicine. 1870, pp. 300-332
  • The natives of South Africa 's: ethnographic and anatomically described. Hirt, Wroclaw 1872
  • Comparative anatomical analysis of the electric organs of Gymnotus electricus. Veit, Leipzig 1881
  • The retinal elements and the three-color theory. Berlin 1904
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