Gabriel Valentin

Gabriel Gustav Valentin, also known as Gabriel Valentin, was a German physiologist born at Breslau in July 1810, the son of a Jewish goldsmith. He took his medical degree at the University of Breslau in 1832 and practised there as a physician. In 1835 he received the Grand Prix of the Institut de France for his book on comparative histogenesis, a treatise on the development of animals and plants. In 1836 he was elected professor of physiology at the University of Bern, a chair he held for forty-five years until he resigned in 1881. His many works covered the blood and its circulation, digestion, the electricity of muscles and nerves, the physiology of the senses and toxicology, and from 1836 to 1843 he published the journal Repertorium für Anatomie und Physiologie. His textbooks of human physiology went through several editions. He died at Bern, Switzerland, on 24 May 1883, aged seventy-two.