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Johannes Müller (1801-1858)

The German medical scientist Johannes Peter Müller (1801-1858) made important contributions to several branches of medicine, including anatomy, physiology, embryology, and pathology.

• Son of a Koblenz shoe-maker, Müller was born on July 14, 1801.
• Until Müller’s fourteenth year, his region was run by France, and he benefited educationally when the Rhineland passed from French into Prussian hands in 1815.
• At the Koblenz Gymnasium, Müller’s talents for mathematics and classical languages caught the attention of Prussian educational reformer Johannes Schulze, who convinced Müller’s father to send him to the newly founded Bonn University instead of teaching him leather-work.
• Since 1818, Cultural Minister Karl Freiherr vom Stein zum Altenstein (1770-1840) had been working to make the Bonn University a showcase for Prussian Protestant scholarship, particularly in the natural sciences.
• He had preferentially hired Naturphilosophen, scholars who developed theories of nature based on elaborate analogies (Steudel 1963, p. 568; Finkelstein 1996, p. 78).
• Inspired by the philosophy of Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph von Schelling (1775-1854), Naturphilosophen believed that the order of nature corresponded to the structure of human consciousness and tried to discern patterns in natural structures, sometimes classifying animals by aligning them with human sensory systems.
• Müller began studying medicine at the Bonn University in the fall of 1819 and quickly embraced this approach to nature, earning his medical degree in 1822 with a doctoral thesis on the patterns of animal movement, especially in insects.
• Between 1828 and 1830, Müller conducted extensive comparative studies of the endocrine and reproductive systems, publishing De glandularum secernetium and Bildungsgeschichte der Genitalien in 1830. He demonstrated that glands, not blood vessels, secrete substances that control bodily functions, and he identified the blood vessels responsible for male erections.

Excerpts from: Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, Berlin - Otis, Laura. 2004. Johannes Müller. The Virtual Laboratory (ISSN 1866-4784) Biography | PDF