Carl Benda

Carl Benda (1857 to 1932) was a German physician, pathologist and anatomist, born in Berlin, who is remembered for naming the mitochondria. In 1898 he stained cells with crystal violet and saw hundreds of tiny bodies in the cytoplasm that tended to form chains; he named them mitochondria, meaning thread granules. He studied medicine in Berlin, Heidelberg, Vienna and Paris and took his medical doctorate in 1881. He then worked as an assistant at the pathology institutes of Halle and Göttingen and at the physiology institute in Berlin, qualified as a university teacher of anatomy in 1888, served as prosector at the Urban hospital in Berlin from 1894 to 1907, and from 1908 to 1925 worked at the Institute of Pathology of the Moabit hospital.