Eduard Hitzig

Eduard Hitzig (Berlin, 1838 – 1907) was a German neurologist and neuropsychiatrist of Jewish ancestry, best known for pioneering experimental neurophysiology. His name is closely tied to the study of the cerebral cortex through electrical stimulation, a line of work that changed how scientists thought about where motor functions are located in the brain.

He studied medicine at the universities of Berlin and Würzburg, training under figures such as Emil du Bois-Reymond, Rudolf Virchow, Moritz Heinrich Romberg and Karl Westphal. He earned his doctorate in 1862 and worked in Berlin and Würzburg. While serving as a physician with the Prussian Army, he treated soldiers with skull fractures caused by bullets and noticed that a small electric current applied to their brains produced involuntary muscle movements.

In 1870, working with the anatomist Gustav Fritsch, he applied electricity through a thin probe to the exposed cortex of a dog, without anesthesia, at Fritsch's home, since the University of Berlin would not permit such experiments in its laboratories. They identified the "motor strip", a band of brain tissue that controls the body's muscles. That same year Hitzig published the results in an essay titled On the Electrical Excitability of the Cerebrum.

He later directed the Burghölzli asylum and held the chair of psychiatry at the University of Zurich, and in 1885 moved to the University of Halle, where he stayed until his retirement in 1903. His work opened the door to further localized brain testing by many others, including the Scottish neurologist David Ferrier.