Walter Rudolf Hess

Walter Rudolf Hess (1881 to 1973) was a Swiss physiologist who won the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1949, shared with Egas Moniz, for mapping the areas of the brain involved in the control of internal organs. Born in Frauenfeld, he studied medicine in Lausanne and then in Berlin, Kiel and Zürich and received his medical degree from the University of Zurich in 1906, then trained as a surgeon and an ophthalmologist and opened a private practice before leaving it in 1912 for research. He served as full professor and director of the Physiological Institute of the University of Zurich from 1917 until 1951. In the 1930s he used electrode stimulation of the diencephalon in cats to map brain regions to specific physiological responses.