Related to D. Whitteridge, 'Ludwig Guttmann. 3 July 1899-18 March 1980', Biographical Memoirs of Fellows of the Royal Society 29 (1983), pp. 227-244.
Description:

'In 1929... Foerster was the leading neurosurgeon of Europe. Though he had trained in France as well as in Germany, he 'shared the scientific methodology of the Anglo-Saxons'. He had a mastery of the anatomy and physiology of the nervous system and he never lost an opportunity of investigating the function of spinal roots and pain pathways, stimulating roots at operation and studying the effects of their section at leisure. During the 1914-18 war he had taken up neurosurgery, and had published his results on a series of twelve patients with spinal cord tumours, with a return of function in nine of them. Unfortunately his neurosurgery was self-taught, and though he later visited Harvey Cushing, he never adopted Cushing's technique and used neither silver clips, electrocautery nor suction apparatus. Cairns (1941) described him as a rather ungainly craftsman, and his haemostasis and even his asepsis were not above reproach.' (228)#

 

'Foerster's only relaxation was to invite his junior colleagues to his house once or twice a week, when they drank Rhine wine and pink champagne and talked till midnight. After the Nazis came to power in 1933 Foerster was for a time under surveillance as the government disapproved of the close contacts he had had with Lenin when he was his chief neurological physician for a year before his death.' (228-229)

 

'The writings of Otfrid Foerster, which are extensive, provide a useful picture both of the state of knowledge in 1920-30 of neurology in general and of studies on paraplegia in particular... The Handbuch der Neurologie of Bumke & Foerster (1935-40) contains long articles by Foerster on pain pathways and the cerebral cortex and most usefully an article by him of 403 pages on the symptomatology of spinal cord injuries (1936a). This includes a detailed description of the sensory and motor losses found with spinal transection at each vertebral level from upper cervical to sacral segments, and also discusses the effects of transection on pilomotor activity, sweating and vasomotor control in the same detail. Andre Thomas in Le reflexe pilomoteur (1921) makes very clear the distinction between pilo- motor activity triggered from the upper intact spinal cord and that triggered from the isolated cord. Foerster does the same for the control of sweating, which he mapped by using starch-iodine powder and is quite clear on the distinction between thermoregulatory sweating triggered from the midbrain, and reflex sweating from the isolated cord. Though his available experimental methods for displaying vasomotor activity were limited, he made the same distinction there... 

The works of both Andre Thomas and Foerster make disagreeable reading, from the contrast between the most elegant and precise neurological observations and the patients' unhindered physical decay.' (231-232)