Louis Sigurd Fridericia

Who was Louis Sigurd Fridericia?

Louis Sigurd Fridericia was a Danish hygienist born in Copenhagen.

Louis Fridericia's family had come to Denmark in the 1750s and took the name of the Jutland town where they settled. He attended the University of his native city of Copenhagen and graduated medicine in 1906.

He became a physician that year and received further education from Christian Bohr in Copenhagen, Ernst Leopold Salkowski in Berlin, Georges Dreyer and Francis Gotch at Oxford.

In Copenhagen he was an assistant at the institutes of physiology, bacteriology, and general pathology, and assistant physician at the Rigshospitalet, the Kommunehospitalet as well as Bispebjerg Hospital.

He was habilitated in 1910 and in 1918 was appointed professor of hygiene. His first works concern the study of metabolism, respiration and circulation, his later works nutritional hygiene and nutritional physiology. He is most known for his repolarization correction formula of the QT interval QTcF.

Fridericia went into hiding after the Nazi Occupation of Denmark and in 1943 was smuggled to Sweden hidden in a fishing boat. He then went to London where he remained until the liberation.