Life
Hess was born in Frauenfeld as the second of three children to Clemens Hess and Gertrud Hess (née Fischer). His father encouraged him to pursue a scientific career and with him he conducted experiments in his physics laboratory. He started to study medicine in Lausanne in 1899 and then in Berlin, Kiel and Zurich. He received his medical degree from the University of Zürich in 1906 and trained as surgeon in Münsterlingen (in the same canton as his birthplace Frauenfeld) under Conrad Brunner (1859 - 1927). He developed a viscosimeter to measure blood viscosity and published his dissertation in 1906 titled Zum Thema Viskosität des Blutes und Herzarbeit. In 1907, he went to the University of Zurich to study under Otto Haab to be trained as an ophthalmologist and opened his own private practice in Rapperswil SG. In these years, he developed the "Hess screen", married Louise Sandmeier and in 1910 their daughter Gertrud Hess was born. 1913 his son Rudolf Max Hess was born.
In 1912, he left his lucrative private practice as an ophthalmologist and went into research under Justus Gaule (1849 - 1939), habilitating in 1913 to become Privatdozent. His main interests were the regulation of blood flow and respiration. During the First World War he spent a year at the Physiological Institute of the University of Bonn under Max Verworn. In 1916, Gaule retired and Hess first became interim director of the Department of the Physiological Institute at the University of Zürich and in 1917 he was officially promoted to full professor and director of the institute as which he served until retirement 1951.
In the 1930s, he began mapping the parts of the diencephalon that control the internal organs using cats. This research won him the Nobel prize in Physiology and Medicine 1949. Hess also helped to found the meteorological research foundation International Foundation for the High Alpine Research Station Jungfraujoch in 1930 and served as its director until 1937. Furthermore, he politically campaigned against the anti-vivisectionists that wanted to forbid animal experimentation.
Hess retired in 1951 but continued working at the university in an office. In 1967, he moved to Ascona and died of heart failure in 1973 at the age of 92 in Locarno, Switzerland.
Read more about this topic: Walter Rudolf Hess
Famous quotes containing the word life:
“Our democracy, our culture, our whole way of life is a spectacular triumph of the blah. Why not have a political convention without politics to nominate a leader who’s out in front of nobody?... Maybe our national mindlessness is the very thing that keeps us from turning into one of those smelly European countries full of pseudo-reds and crypto-fascists and greens who dress like forest elves.”
—P.J. (Patrick Jake)
“Franceska: I was happy in the life I built up for myself. I put a fine high wall of music around me and nothing could touch me. I was safe and secure. And then you had to come along and knock it all down and I hate you for that.
Maxwell: On the contrary, you love me.”
—Muriel Box (b. 1905)
“All I know is that first, you’ve got to get mad. You’ve got to say, ‘I’m a human being, goddamn it, my life has value.’ So I want you to get up now, I want all of you to get up out of your
chairs. I want you to get up right now, and go to the window, open it, and stick your head out, and yell, ‘I’m as mad as hell, and I’m not going to take it anymore.’”
—Paddy Chayefsky (1923–1981)