Hitzig, (Julius) Eduard

(b. Berlin, Germany, 6 February 1838; d. Luisenbheim Zu St. Blasien, Germany, 20 August 1907)

neurophysiology, psychiatry.

Hitzig came from a distinguished Jewish family. His grandfather, also called Julius Eduard, was a well-known criminologist, publisher, and author. His father, Friedrich, was a renowned architect who designed several important buildings in Berlin, where a street bears his name. An uncle was the art historian Franz Kugler and a cousin the famous chemist and Nobel Prize winner Adolf von Baeyer.

At first Hitzig studied law but soon tranferred to medicine and attended the medical school at Berlin, and for a time that at Würzburg. He had the good fortune to be taught by du Bois-Reymond, Virchow, Moritz Heinrich Romberg, and Carl Friedrich Otto Westphal. He received the M.D. in 1862 and thereafter began to practice internal medicine in Berlin; his Habilitation was completed in 1872.

As a result of an outstanding contribution to the knowledge of the function of the cerebral cortex, Hitzig acquired an international reputation, and in 1875 he was offered the directorship of the Berghölzli mental asylum near Zurich and a professorship at the University of Zurich. He accepted this academic advancement but retained the post for only four years. Unfortunately, his constant conflicts with the administrator of the asylum caused a national scandal. Hitzig was replaced by Forel, who described the chaotic state of the institution at the time of his arrival there—a state due mainly to Hitzig’s personality. Hitzig’s intentions were laudable and honorable—he tried to run the asylum well, improved the staff, dispensed with tipping, and founded a soceity for the relief of psychiatric patients—but his vanity and arrogance offended others and his lack of insight induced a feeling of martyrdom in himself.

From Zurich, Hitzig went to the University of Halle as professor of psychiatry and director of the Nietleben mental asylum. In 1885 he became director of a new psychiatric clinic at Halle, from which he was forced to retire on 1 October 1903, because of progressive diabetic optic atrophy, which led to blindness. He also suffered from gout. In 1866 he married Etta, daughter of the Marburg theologian Ernst Ranke, and she collaborated with Hitzig in the preparation of a book on food catering in neuropsychiatric hospitals. They had no children.

A stern, disagreeable man who displayed no emotion, Hitzing was rigid and unfriendly and seemed to enjoy being abrupt and caustic to others. He believed that controversy was essential in the scientific world and necessary for progress. Toward the end of his life he retired reluctantly from his polemics. His personality traits have been succinctly summarized as “incorrigible conceit and vanity complicated by Prussianism.” His publications contain bitter polemics foreign to modern medical literature, and he was always willing to battle for a cherished notion. Opponents such as Hermann Munk and Goltz, who attacked him with equal brutality, were usually forthcoming. On the whole it was the physiologists with whom he waged constant warfare, for clinicians seemed more willing to accept his ideas.

Despite an apparently forbidding personality, it is said that Hitzig extended fatherly advice and friendship to his students and his home in Halle was a center of hospitality. He did not, however, leaver a school. His contributions to medicine were to the physiology o the cerebral cortex and to clinical psychiatry.

At the beginning of the nineteenth century the phrenologists had postulated that the surface of the brain, both the cerebral and cerebellar hemispheres, was divided into specific, functional areas. But the experiments of Flourens, later shown to be erroneous, had been accepted by almost everyone as disproving this theory. In the 1860’s, however, clinical evidence brought forward by Simon Alesandre Ernest Aubertin (echoing the earlier contentions of his fater-in-law Jean Baptiste Bouillaud), by Broca, and in particular by J. Hughlings Jackson seemed to refute Flourens’s conclusions. In 1870 Hitzig, in collaboration with Fritsch, showed conclusively that electrical stimulation of certain areas of the cerebral cortex in the dog produced movements of the contralateral limbs and that removal of these areas led to weakness of the same limbs. Their revolutionary investigations, said to have been carried out in Hitzig’s bedroom, were the beginning of the electrophysiology of the cerebral cortex and of the experimental approach to the localization of function in it. Their paper “Ueber dieelektrische Erregbarkeit des Grosshirns” (1870) is a classic of physiology.

This epoch-making research led Hitzig to investigate on his own the problem of localization in the cerebral cortex. In motor functions he indicated the scale of possible movements, ranging from the simplest variety to the complex psychomotor type. In 1874 he published the results of further experiments on electrical stimulation and ablation of the cortex. He was especially concerned with the visual cortex, the bilateral removal of which produced blindness or, if only one side was damaged, a contralateral visual-field defect. In this work he favored a precise and isolated localization of function and thus bitterly opposed Munk, who believed that the cortical centers acted together in aggregation, as did the special senses.

Hitzig also investigated experimentally the problem of the localization of mental processes in the brain. His findings favored a regional localization of intelligence in the frontal lobes, but as was the case with other early observers his techniques for the pre- and postoperative assessment of his animals were faulty; his behavioral methods were on the whole impressionistic. Moreover, he never reached a clear understanding of what “intelligence” signified. Nevertheless, his prestige as an investigator placed his views in opposition to the contentions of Goltz, who supported the holistic concept of brain function initiated by Flourens, in which all parts of the organ are considered functionally equivalent. In this work, too, Hitzig partially opposed Munk’s aggregation theory, and he stated in 1874:

Along with him [Munk] I believe that intelligence, or more accurately, the storage of ideas, is to be looked for in all portions of the cerebral cortex, or rather in all parts of the brain. I contend however that abstract thought must necessarily require specific organs and I locate these in the frontal brain (Ueber die Funktionen der Grosshirnrinde, p. 261).

Throughout his researches on cortical localization, Hitzig rejected the holistic theory and, although unsuccessful, spent much effort to disprove it. His experimental work was of the highest order, and he demanded precision and accuracy throughout; he accepted only exact data recorded under controlled conditions. He did not stray from the firm ground of fact and excluded philosophical or metaphysical speculation. In contrast to some of his contemporaries, the problem of the soul and its possible location found no place in his deliberations.

Hitzig’s influence on the growing field of psychology in the nineteenth century was extensive, and he had a similar impact on psychiatry. Believing that the brain was the instrument of the mind, he attempted to place the treatment of psychiatric patients on a more scientific basis. In doing so he brought public attention to the problem of adequate care for these patients. He also influenced the development of psychiatry as a specialty and maintained that psychiatrists must also be fully qualified physicians.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

I. Original Works Hitzig’s more important books and papers are “Ueber die elektrische Erregbarkeit des Grosshirns,” in Archiv für Anatomie und Physiologie (1870), pp. 300–332, written with G. T. Fritsch, English trans. in G. von Bonin, The Cerebral Cortex (Springfield, Ill., 1960), pp. 72–96, and discussed and excerpted in E. Clarke and C. D. O’Malley, The Brain and Spinal Cord, (Berkeley-Los Angeles, 1968), pp. 507–511; Untersuchungen über das Gehirn (Berlin, 1874), a collection of papers on physiological and pathological aspects of the brain, most of which had appeared elsewhere; Ueber die Funktionen der Grosshirnrinde: Gesammelte Mittheilungen mit Anmerkungen (Berlin, 1890), which contains Hitzig’s attacks upon Hermann Munk; Hughlings Jackson und die motorischen Rindencentren im Lichte physiologischer Forschung (Berlin, 1901); Physiologische und klinische Untersuchungen über das Gehirn. Gesammelte Abhandlungen, 2 pts. (Berlin, 1904), of which the first, “Untersuchungen über das Gehirn,” contains papers he had published in the 1874 collection of reprinted papers, and the second, “Alte und neue Untersuchungen ueber das Gehirn. Gesammelte Abhandlungen,” contains the results of his experiments on the optic pathways; and Welt und Gehirn (Berlin, 1905).

II. Secondary Literature. The best biographies are those of his student R. Wollenberg, “Eduard Hitzig†,” in Archiv für Psychiatrie und Nervenkrankheiten, 43 (1908), iii-xv; and T. Kirchoff, ed., Deutsche Irrenärzte, II (Berlin, 1924), 148–156. See also A. Kuntz, “Eduard Hitzig (1838–1907),” in W. Haymaker and F. Schiller, eds., The Founders of Neurology, 2nd ed. (Springfield, Ill., 1970), pp. 229–233, with portrait, not altogether reliable; August Forel, Out of My Life and Work, trans. by B. Miall (New York, 1937), pp. 112, 116, 124–125, 126–127; and Hans-Heinz Eulner, “Eduard Hitzig (1838–1907)” in Wissenschaftliche Zeitschrift der Martin-Luther-Universität, Halle-Wittenberg, 6 (1957), 709–712, which contains information on Hitzig’s contact with others, his personality, and his stay at Halle, but does not discuss his work in detail.

Edwin Clarke