Politzer gave his lectures on otologic diseases for over 46 years without interruption and received more than 7,000 students from all over the world. Vienna became an indispensable stop in Europe for the training in medicine, particularly in the special field of otology
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Furthermore, he revolutionized the clinical diagnosis of aural diseases by the inspection of the illuminated tympanic membrane (which led to the current otoscope), and developed the first illustrated atlas of the tympanic membrane in health and disease, with color drawings made by himself. Politzer also wrote one of the most outstanding and authoritative textbooks on otology of the century, the Lehrbuch der Ohrenheilkunde, in 1878. With von Troeltsch and Hermann Schwartze, he founded Archiv für Ohrenheilkunde, the first journal dedicated to ear disorders.
A great anatomist of the auditory system, Politzer wrote and illustrated extensively on it, and left a remarkable collection of anatomic and pathological specimens in Vienna, which were donated to the Anatomy and Pathology Museum. The luminous cone of the tympanic membrane is named after him, as well as the Unna-Politzer naevus, a typical birthmark found on the nape of the neck in 25 to 50% of normal persons. In addition, in 1893 Politzer was the first to describe otosclerosis as a separate clinical entity. He also studied the pathology of cholesteatoma, serous otitis media, labyrinthitis, congenital deafness and intracranial complications of otitis media.
One of his biographers, Albert Mudry, stated that Politzer was "the greatest otologist of the 19th century and one of the greatest of all time (...) he covered all fields of otology". He influenced and trained thousands of otologists from over the world, and his most famous successor was Robert Bárány, who received the Nobel Prize for medicine in 1914.