Goetzl, Alfred

Biography

Alfred Götzl was born in Vienna in 1873, the fifth and last child of Salomon Götzl (1827-1891) and Marie (Schuessler) Götzl (1839-1923.) He graduated from the University of Vienna Medical School in 1898. He practiced medicine from 1898 until 1914. In 1907, he married Paula Spitzer (1886-1984) who bore him two children: Johanna Goetzl (1908-2004) and Franz Rudolf Goetzl (1914-1981.) From 1914 – 1916, he served as a physician in the Austrian Army during the first world war establishing field hospitals behind the front first in Galicia and then in Bosnia Herzegovina. After the war, Dr. Götzl was appointed scientific co-worker in the Division of Public Health of the Ministry of the Interior in which capacity he worked out a plan of action for the campaign against tuberculosis for the whole of Austria. Following that work, Dr. Götzl was appointed full time head of the tuberculosis division in the Public Health Department for the city of Vienna. He continued that work until the Nazi invasion of Austria in 1938 when he was forced to retire. From 1926 to 1938, Dr. Götzl was also a lecturer in internal medicine with special reference to tuberculosis in the Wenckebach Medical Clinic of the University of Vienna Medical School. He was secretary of the Public Health Association of Austria from 1932 to 1937. After his immigration to the United States, he served as lecturer at the Medical School at the University of California, San Francisco. In 1944, he co-authored with Ralph Reynolds, M.D. Biography of Julius Tandler. Dr. Alfred Götzl died in San Francisco, California in 1946.

Franz R. Goetzl, the son of Alfred Götzl, M.D., was born in Vienna in 1914. An accomplished pianist and violinist, he completed his medical studies at the University of Vienna but had to emigrate in 1938 just before he would have received his medical degree there. After being awarded a M.S. and a Ph.D. in physiology and pharmacology in 1942 by the Graduate School of Northwestern University, he was awarded a B. Med and a M.D. in 1944 by the Medical School of Northwestern University. Throughout his studies and research at Northwestern University, he was mentored by Andrew C. Ivy, M.D. for whom he maintained a life-long affection. In 1940, he married Shirley Schneider of Chicago, Illinois. They had two children: Thomas M. Goetzl born in 1943 and Randall A. Goetzl born in 1946. Shirley died in Oakland, CA in 1950. In 1951, he married Jean Howden. They had son, Charles F. Goetzl born in 1953. Jean died in Oakland, California in 2007. From 1945 to 1952, Dr. Goetzl was Director of the Institute of Medical Research for the Permanente Foundation in Oakland, California. In addition to other professional organizations, he was a member of the American Physiological Society, the New York Academy of Sciences, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and the American Medical Association. Beginning in the 1950s, at a time when medical schools classes were dominated by young, white men, generally of privileged backgrounds, Dr. Goetzl pursued a dream of establishing a new medical school which would welcome women, minorities, low-income applicants, and even older students. Ahead of his time, and despite his best efforts over the next decade and a half, he was unable to overcome powerful resistance to such a then radical concept. In 1971, he was made a Life-Member of the American Medical Society of Vienna. In 1975, he edited a pioneering examination of the relationship between boredom and society, Boredom: Root of Discontent and Aggression. Dr. Franz R. Goetzl practiced medicine in Oakland, California from 1951 until his death in Berkeley, California in 1981.

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