Friedrich Goltz

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(1834 - 1902)
Trincker, Dietrich, „Goltz, Friedrich Leopold“, in: Neue Deutsche Biographie 6 (1964), S. 636-637 [Onlinefassung]
http://www.catalogus-professorum-halensis.de/goltzfriedrich.html
http://drw.saw-leipzig.de/30318.html
Note: Goltz took classes in physiology from Helmholtz while he was in Königsberg. After Helmholtz left for Berlin in 1855 he was succeeded by Von Wittich. According to Pflüger Helmholtz' influence on Goltz was rather limited.

http://electroneubio.secyt.gov.ar/Brain's_political_structure.doc

Friedrich Goltz (1834-1902), the major German opponent of localization, had sharply contrasting social origins, intellectual aims, and professional interests. Goltz was born not in Berlin but in the town of Poznan (Posen), and grew up in an area where German, Polish, Jewish, and Russian influences intermingled (Ewald, 1903; Rothschuh, 1972). The strongest influence on his early years was his uncle Bogumil, a well known popular writer and cultural nationalist. Bogumil Goltz's Die Deutschen (1860) emphasized that one of the greatest advantages the Germans had over other peoples such as the French was that Germany was culturally united but politically fragmented, and therefore the German sense of nationhood was not distorted by the unfortunate aggressiveness and worldliness of the modern state.
Friedrich Goltz studied anatomy and physiology at Konigsberg with Hermann Helmholtz. However, he soon rejected the physicalistic reductionism of the Berlin "school" of physiology, and even more their reliance on delicate and complex instrumentation, in favor of simple observations and experiments in the tradition of Johannes Mueller. Goltz established himself within the physiology profession in the 1860s with studies on the "adaptive capacities" of decerebrated frogs (Goltz, 1869), emphasizing that the behavior of such organisms was much more complex than a mere combination of reflexes.
In 1872 Goltz became professor of physiology at the new University of Strasbourg (Strassburg), created as part of Bismarck's campaign to Germanify the new province of Alsace that had been acquired in the recent war with France (Craig, 1972, pp. 209-221, 379-393). Along with the other Strasbourg professors, Goltz saw himself as a missionary of German Kultur (Goltz, 1888). The example university professors would provide through their devotion to scholarship would gradually impress upon the Alsatians the excellence of their "original" German heritage; at the same time the meaning of Germanness itself would be broadened through incorporation of the local and French traditions. The professors believed that the initial antagonism of the Alsatians towards the radical political change of 1870 would gradually fade as time passed and an atmosphere of cooperation took its place. The major obstacle to this, in the opinion of Goltz and his colleagues, was the direct political and military control being exercised over the area by Berlin, and even more the "Kommandoton" and overbearing attitude of the Prussian bureaucrats (Waldeyer-Hartz, 1921, p. 170; Craig, 1972, pp. 379-393). Goltz's Strasbourg experience thus strongly reinforced a number of his earlier convictions: the importance of cooperation among ethnic groups, his allegiance to physiology as a pure science, the separation between culture and political power that his uncle had emphasized, and the provincial's resentment of central bureaucratic interference. It is not surprising that, as Goltz pursued research in brain physiology, he began to oppose the localization concepts of Hitzig, Fritsch, and other Berliners such as Hermann Munk.
Goltz considered Hitzig's demonstration of cortical excitability interesting but behaviorally irrelevant, and argued that motor defects in the immediate aftermath of ablations were merely due to trauma. Only the permanent results of ablations were significant for understanding the normal functions of the cortex. While large ablations of both hemispheres in dogs produced visual disturbances, general sensory weakness, and lowering of intelligence, there was never the total paralysis one would expect if a real "controlling center" had been removed (1881, pp. 1, 75-128, 159-173). Goltz recognized that his results were less certain and more variable than the well-defined claims of localizers, but felt the complexity of life should not be over-simplified. He compared cerebral localization charts to the arbitrary boundaries among the old German states, and argued that such sharp "political" boundaries could not apply to a living entity like the brain (1881, p. 102; 1885, p. 372). The closest analogy in his view would be a map of vegetation (or, though he did not say so, of European nationalities), where populations overlapped and the dominant character changed only gradually. What was important was the extent of adaptability and accommodation, and the insignificance of boundaries.
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