Otfrid Foerster

Otfrid Foerster (1873 to 1941) was a German neurologist and neurosurgeon born in Breslau, now Wroclaw. He studied medicine at Freiburg, Kiel and Breslau, worked in Paris and Switzerland, and collaborated with Karl Wernicke on an anatomical atlas of the brain published in 1903. He developed posterior root section, or rhizotomy, for spasticity in 1908, anterolateral cordotomy for pain, the hyperventilation test for epilepsy, and some of the first surgeries for epilepsy, and he advanced knowledge of dermatomes and the motor cortex. He treated Lenin after his stroke, which later led to political pressure under the National Socialists. He died in Breslau in 1941.