Friedrich Goll

Friedrich Goll (1 March 1829 to 12 November 1903) was a Swiss neuroanatomist born in Zofingen in the canton of Aargau. He received his medical doctorate from the University of Zurich in 1853 and continued his studies in Paris under the physiologist Claude Bernard. Back in Zurich he worked from 1855 as a general practitioner, became habilitated for special pathology and pharmacology in 1862, and from 1863 to 1869 directed the medical polyclinic. From 1885 to 1901 he was associate professor of pharmacology at Zurich. He was an avid mountaineer, a promoter of spas and resorts in Graubünden, and from 1885 to 1895 president of the Medical Society of the Canton of Zurich. Goll is remembered for describing the fasciculus gracilis, a bundle of axon fibres in the spinal cord that is also called the tract of Goll in his honor.