Robert Franz Schmidt

Robert Franz Schmidt (1932 to 2017) was a German physiologist and professor emeritus. Born in Ludwigshafen on 16 September 1932, he studied medicine at Heidelberg University, received a medical doctorate there in 1959 and a Ph.D. from the Australian National University in Canberra in 1963, and qualified as a university lecturer in physiology at Heidelberg in 1964. He directed the Institute of Physiology at Kiel University from 1971 to 1982 and at the University of Würzburg from 1982 to 2000, and he chaired the German Physiological Society in 1979. His research moved from cardiac electrophysiology and pharmacology through presynaptic inhibition in the spinal cord and cerebellar physiology to the neurophysiology of pain, and he discovered sleeping pain receptors that begin to function only when tissues become inflamed. He died on 13 September 2017.