Fritz Köberle (October 1, 1910 in Eichgraben, Austria – February 20, 1983) was an Austrian-Brazilian physician, pathologist and scientist, discoverer of the neurogenic mechanism of the chronic phase of Chagas disease, a human parasitic disease caused by Trypanosoma cruzi, a protozoan. Life Fritz Köberle was born in Eichgraben, Austria, and studied medicine at the University of Vienna, Austria, graduating magna cum laude in 1934. He began to work in the Institute of Pathology while he was a student and, soon after his 1935 graduation, he was admitted as an assistant professor. With the annexation of Austria to Germany (Anschluss), Köberle was drafted into the Army as a medical lieutenant and worked as a pathologist in the Central Army Hospital of Vienna. With the outbreak of the Second World War hostilities, Köberle was attached as field pathologist to the XII Army Group of the Wehrmacht in 1940 and served in the fronts of France, Belgium, Poland and Russia. He was able to acquire during this period an enormous experience on the pathology of infectious diseases (bacterial dysentery, typhus, typhoid fever, tularemia and malaria) as well as war-inflicted wounds, and performing more than four thousand autopsies. After the war, Köberle returned to the University of Münster as Privatdozent, continuing his activities as professor and researcher of medical pathology until 1945. He returned shortly to the University of Vienna, and, in 1946, accepted a post as director of the Serological and Pathological Institute of the General Hospital of St. Pölten, Lower Austria. In 1952, he received an invitation which would radically change his personal and scientific life. A new medical school was being established by the University of São Paulo in Ribeirão Preto, in the hinterland of the state of São Paulo, Brazil. The main objective of the state government was to increase the number of physicians in the rapidly developing hinterland, and its first dean, Dr. Zeferino Vaz, a parasitologist, medical research and professor of the University, wished to create a favorable environment for high quality medical research and teaching in the new school. With this in mind, Vaz invited a number of foreign researchers to become chairmen of the basic and clinical departments, and Fritz Köberle had a good recommendation by Prof. Henrique da Rocha Lima, a Brazilian medical researcher who had studied in Germany. Dr. Köberle accepted an invitation and moved with his family to the Medical School of Ribeirão