Heinz Prechtl

Heinz Friedrich Rudolf Prechtl (born July 6, 1927 in Vienna ; † July 3, 2014 in Graz ; also HFR Prechtl ) was an Austrian researcher , physician , zoologist and anthropologist . He became a university professor at the age of 35 .

Life

Heinz Prechtl, who had already decided to become a “researcher” at the age of eleven, regularly suffered from “strep throat”, a pretext that allowed him to observe and draw animals at Schönbrunn Zoo instead of going to school, or already to hear lectures on medicine as a 17-year-old.

An aerial bomb , which caused a severe arm nerve injury to his right shoulder during a bombardment by the detonation, saved his life; his career as an animal artist ended prematurely, but he could no longer be called up to the front because of his injury. Prechtl graduated from high school in 1946 and studied medicine as well as zoology and anthropology. At his side was Ilse Zachau, a young zoology student who introduced him to Otto König , for whom the two worked on Wilhelminenberg until 1947 .

There was dire need in bombed Vienna . Ilse and Heinz married in 1948, they lived with Konrad Lorenz in Altenberg . When he got a Max Planck Institute in Buldern , he took the two young researchers with him with the words "You starved with me, now you should have something to eat with me!" At that time Irenäus Eibl-Eibesfeldt and Wolfgang Schleidt also belonged to the circle around Konrad Lorenz. Nico Tinbergen influenced the work of the young Heinz Prechtl. A period of intense work began. In private, the family expanded (original sound from Konrad Lorenz: "As soon as you feed them, they start to breed!") Around daughter Kiki, born in 1952 in Münster .

Heinz Prechtl received the offer to work for Drooglever Fortyn at the University Clinic for Neurology in Groningen (NL). He was to stay in the Netherlands for 38 years. Prechtl, who gave his first lecture in 1947 at the Urania in Vienna on the subject of "animal observation", has published over 400 medical publications since 1949.

A lecture at the international neurologist congress in Vienna in 1965 led him to the realization that the human brain behaves differently at different ages. This gave the impetus for the establishment of a new medical specialty, developmental neurology . He not only founded this subject, but was also the first to research and describe fetal and early childhood patterns of movement and behavior . He used the film documentation for his observations early on.

His scientific life went smoothly, privately he had to endure severe strokes of fate: his wife Ilse, who had given him three daughters, died in 1971. His second wife Inga, who was married from 1972 to 1991, also died of a serious illness.

In 1993, after his retirement, Heinz Prechtl moved to Graz , where he carried out important research for the Prechtl method with Christa Einspiel as visiting professor and then as honorary professor at the Physiological Institute. Together, they examined hundreds of infants and young children and reported their results to doctors and therapists around the world. The most important work to date on this subject was published in 1997 in the medical journal The Lancet . Heinz Friedrich Rudolf Prechtl died on July 3, 2014 in Graz .

Services

During his time as a full professor at the Institute for Developmental Neurology at the University of Groningen , he succeeded in developing a method that allows the further development of infants to be assessed by filming their movement patterns. The so-called “ Prechtl-Method ”, meanwhile checked by Prechtl and his coworkers and distributed all over the world, allows with a certainty of 96% the exclusion or the prognosis of the development of a later cerebral palsy .

Prechtl found the so-called " Prechtl syndrome ", a choreiform movement disorder that becomes manifest in kindergarten age and can be accompanied by involuntary (unwanted and unmanageable) muscle twitching of the eye muscles and the muscles of the upper shoulder girdle and arms. This minor neurological impairment, which he published for the first time in 1957 in the Wiener Medizinische Wochenschrift , can lead to great restlessness and school difficulties of the children concerned and is nowadays often wrongly diagnosed as ADHD .

Prechtl was the inventor of the “ optimality concept ”, a method that allows us to carry out scientific comparative analyzes based on the positive parameters instead of the lack of them.

Honors

In addition to many international awards, two universities awarded him honorary doctorates in medicine ( Genoa and Graz ). In honor of his scientific work, Heinz Prechtl was awarded Knight of the Order of the Dutch Lion by Queen Beatrix of the Netherlands in 1991 .

Web links

• Former website of the Prof. Prechtl Center, Graz (German)
• Obituary on ICNApedia (English)