Fritz E. Dreifuss

Fritz E. Dreifuss, MD (January 20, 1926 – October 18, 1997) was a German-born, New Zealand-educated, American neurologist and subspecialist in epilepsy based at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville, Virginia, US.

Dreifuss was born in Dresden, Germany. To escape German state persecution of Jews, the Dreifuss family emigrated to New Zealand, arriving in 1937. His father began a general practice in medicine.

Fritz was educated at Wanganui Collegiate and the University of Otago, from where he graduated MB ChB (NZ) in 1951. He trained in neurology at Auckland Hospital, New Zealand, and the National Hospital for Neurology and Neurosurgery (Queen Square/NHNN) in London, England.

In 1959 he was hired as a faculty neurologist at the University of Virginia. During his first faculty year, he simultaneously worked as a medical intern at a regional hospital to be eligible for a Virginia medical license.

Dreifuss’ clinical and research career centered on the evaluation and treatment of epilepsy in children and adults. In 1959, he was named head of the Commonwealth of Virginia’s Child Neurology Program. To fulfill this mission, he formed a series of satellite field clinics around the Commonwealth to provide state-of-the-art neurological care in regions remote from main medical centers at a time when neurologists were few. He maintained this clinics throughout his career in collaboration with colleague James Q. Miller. Although the emphasis was on epilepsy, patients with a wide range of neurological disorders were served. Three Appalachian field clinics in Tazewell, Wise, and Bristol, Virginia continue to be staffed by University of Virginia neurologists.

In the 1960s he and several colleagues in the US, especially Kiffin Penry, created the concept of subspecialty epilepsy care represented as the Comprehensive Epilepsy Program. This approach gathered clinical neurologists, pediatric neurologists, electrophysiologists, specialized nursing, educational consultants, and psychologists with the common mission of epilepsy care. In 1974 Dreifuss competed successfully for an NIH-sponsored grant for the formation of a comprehensive epilepsy center, forming one of the three original centers in the US. An integral part of a comprehensive epilepsy center was the development of feasible long-term monitoring methods with the use of simultaneous video-EEG in order to best diagnose and characterize epileptic seizures. With electrophysiology colleagues, Dreifuss aided in the development of the video-EEG system and was one of its early adopters in clinical epilepsy research.

...
Wikipedia