Karl Wilhelm von Kupffer

Karl Wilhelm Ritter von Kupffer was a Baltic German anatomist, born in 1829 and died in 1902, whose name is attached to the stellate macrophage cells of the liver that he described in 1876. He took his medical doctorate at the Imperial University of Dorpat in 1854, worked there as an assistant to the physiologist Friedrich Heinrich Bidder, and then travelled to Vienna, Berlin and Göttingen, where he studied physiology under Emil Du Bois-Reymond and Johannes Peter Müller. He held the chair of anatomy at Kiel from 1866, at Königsberg from 1875, and at the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München from 1880 until his retirement in 1901. His research centred on neuroanatomy and embryology, including the development of the brain, spleen, pancreas and kidneys, and while at Königsberg he examined the skull of the philosopher Immanuel Kant. He first read the liver cells as pericytes and in 1898 revised that view, and the pathologist Tadeusz Browicz later identified them as macrophages.