Though known for his work as a physiologist, in which he and E. Hitzig demonstrated the occurrence of epileptic fits as a result of excitation of the cerebral cortex, Fritsch also took part as anthropologist and photographer in the Prussian Solar Eclipse expedition to Aden, 1868 and the Prussian Venus Expedition to Isfahan, and photographed many Egyptian antiquities. For anthropologists he illustrated and published a book on the human body, Die Gestalt des Menschen (1899, 2nd ed. 1905) He was the first president of the Freie Photographische Vereinigung, founded in Berlin in 1889
