Max Schultze

Max Schultze (born March 25, 1825, Freiburg, Germany—died January 16, 1874, Bonn) was a German zoologist and cytologist who, in 1861, defined the cell as a mass of protoplasm with a nucleus and recognized the protoplasm, a living substance, as the fundamental unit of life in both plants and animals, proposing that the cell need not be enclosed by a wall—a concept that helped establish the modern version of cell theory.

Education

Schultze studied medicine at the University of Greifswald, with a brief period of study at the University of Berlin, where he was influenced by leading physiologists Johannes Müller and Ernst Wilhelm von Brücke. After completing his dissertation on the structure, function, and chemical composition of arteries, he received a medical degree from Greifswald in 1849.

Work

Schultze was a lecturer in anatomy at the University of Halle but left in 1859 to accept a chair at the University of Bonn, becoming director of the Anatomical Institute there in 1872.

He was an outstanding histologist, introducing several new techniques including the use of osmic acid for staining fine details of cells. His scientific writings included important monographs on the nerve endings of such sense organs as the internal ear (1858) and the nose (1863).

In 1865 Schultze was the first to observe and describe platelets as small, colorless spherules in circulating blood and emphasized their importance by recommending them as a subject for further research for those studying human blood. The following year he proposed the duplicity theory of vision, suggesting that vision depends on two types of retinal cells in the eye—rods to adjust to dim light and cones to adjust to bright light and perceive color. Schultze also founded the journal Archiv für mikroskopische Anatomie in 1865 and served as its editor until his death.