Franz von Paula Gruithuisen

Franz von Paula Gruithuisen (1774 to 1852) was a Bavarian physician who became better known as an astronomer. Born at Schloss Haltenberg on the Lech into a poor family, he trained at a surgeons' school and served as a hospital assistant in the Austrian army during the Turkish war before the Elector of Bavaria's court helped him study natural science and medicine at Landshut, where he took his doctorate in 1808. He then taught physics, chemistry, anthropology and the history of medicine at the school for country doctors in Munich. His early medical writing, including the Organozoonomie of 1811, proposed a theory of inflammation and described the formed elements of the blood, and he worked on lithotripsy, the breaking up of kidney and bladder stones, for which the Paris Academy gave him a prize. From 1826 he was a professor of astronomy at Munich, where his lunar studies and his disputed claim of inhabitants on the Moon made him famous.