Martin Heidenhain

Martin Heidenhain was a German anatomist, born in Breslau on 7 December 1864 and dying on 14 December 1949. He came from a scientific family: his father was the physiologist Rudolf Heidenhain, and his mother, Fanny Volkmann, was the daughter of the anatomist Alfred Wilhelm Volkmann. He studied medicine at Freiburg im Breisgau and in 1890 became an assistant to Albert von Kölliker at the University of Würzburg, where he also worked as a prosector. In 1899 he moved to the University of Tübingen as an associate professor and stayed there for the rest of his career, again serving as prosector. He is remembered for work in comparative anatomy, embryology and histology, and he created several histological stains that carry his name, among them an iron haematoxylin stain that is still widely used. The physiologist William Bayliss credited his study of how pancreatic secretion follows the course of digestion in the stomach and intestines as an influence on the discovery of secretin, the first hormone to be isolated. In 1894 he introduced the word telophase for the last stage of mitosis. His principal written work was Plasma und Zelle, published between 1907 and 1911.