Eduard Hitzig

Eduard Hitzig (1838 to 1907) was a German neurologist and neuropsychiatrist of Jewish ancestry, born in Berlin and trained at the universities of Berlin and Würzburg under teachers including Du Bois-Reymond and Virchow. He directed the Burghölzli asylum and held the chair of psychiatry at Zurich from 1875, then became professor at Halle in 1885 and stayed until his retirement in 1903. In 1870, working with the anatomist Gustav Fritsch, he applied a thin electrical probe to the exposed cortex of a dog and showed that stimulating different areas produced involuntary movements of specific body parts, identifying the motor strip of the brain. This was the first localized study of the brain with electric current and prepared the ground for David Ferrier and others.