Thirty-nine years ago today, on January 28, 1986 (December 19, 1985 lunar calendar), Hess, the Swiss Nobel laureate in medicine, died. Walter Rudolf Hess (March 17, 1881 - April 12, 1973), winner of the 1949 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine. Swiss physiologist, born in Frauenfeld. First an ophthalmologist, he later switched to graduate studies in science, and became interested in the autonomic nervous system. He used small electrodes to stimulate or destroy certain parts of the brains of cats and dogs, and found that the centers of autonomic function were at the bottom of the brain - the medulla oblongata, the diencephalon, and especially the hypothalamus. He pinpointed the control center of each function so precisely that by stimulating a fixed point in the cat's hypothalamus, he could cause the cat to behave as it would when encountering a dog. He shared the 1949 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine with Egas Moniz for discovering the role of certain parts of the brain in determining and coordinating the function of internal organs. Author of "Psychobiology" and so on.