Walter Rudolf Hess

Walter Rudolf Hess was a Swiss physiologist, born in Frauenfeld in 1881 and dead in Locarno in 1973, who shared the 1949 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine with Egas Moniz for mapping the areas of the brain that control the internal organs. He trained in medicine at several universities and took his degree at Zurich in 1906, then worked as a surgeon and an ophthalmologist, where he devised the Hess screen, before leaving a lucrative private practice in 1912 for research. From 1917 until 1951 he directed the Physiological Institute of the University of Zurich. Using fine electrodes and weak interrupted current, he stimulated defined regions of the diencephalon in cats and linked the hypothalamus to blood pressure, respiration, hunger, thirst, defensive behavior and sleep. He also campaigned against attempts to ban animal experimentation.