Fritz was educated at Wanganui Collegiate and the University of Otago, from where he graduated MB ChB (NZ) in 1951.
To fulfill this mission, he formed a series of satellite field clinics around the Commonwealth to provide state-of-the-art neurological care in regions remote from main medical centers at a time when neurologists were few.
An integral part of a comprehensive epilepsy center was the development of feasible long-term monitoring methods with the use of simultaneous video-EEG in order to best diagnose and characterize epileptic seizures.
With electrophysiology colleagues, Dreifuss aided in the development of the video-EEG system and was one of its early adopters in clinical epilepsy research.
With collaborator Kiffin Penry and others and with the use of advanced video-EEG techniques, Dreifuss investigated the correlations between the clinical symptoms of absence seizures and their accompaniments on EEG.
The standardization of terms have allowed research protocols and clinical practice to discuss the epilepsies in a common language.
[10] In 2001, the American Academy of Neurology posthumously designated the annual Dreifuss-Penry Award for outstanding career contributions in epileptology.
[11] Severed Heads, an Australian industrial pop group active in the 1980s, released on their 1983 album “Since the Accident” a cut entitled “Epilepsy ‘82”.