Friedrich Goltz

Friedrich Leopold Goltz was a German physiologist, born in Posen in 1834 and a nephew of the writer Bogumil Goltz. He studied medicine at the University of Königsberg, completed two years of surgical training and served as prosector of anatomy there. In 1870 he succeeded A. W. Volkmann as professor of physiology at the University of Halle, and from 1872 he held a professorship at the University of Straßburg, where he died in 1902. He is known for experiments in neurophysiology and is credited as the first scientist to perform a hemispherectomy on a dog. In 1870 he introduced a hydrostatic concept of the semicircular canals of the inner ear and their role in the sense of position and equilibrium. At the International Medical Congress in London in 1881 he defended a unitary view of brain function, showing a dog that stayed functional after parts of its cerebral cortex were removed, in contrast to the localization of cerebral functions argued by David Ferrier.