Paul Grawitz

Paul Albert Grawitz (1 October 1850 to 27 June 1932) was a German pathologist, born at Zerrin in Pomerania, in territory that is now part of Poland, and active for most of his career in Greifswald. He studied medicine at the University of Berlin, where he became an assistant to the pathologist Rudolf Virchow, and he stayed on as Virchow's assistant after graduating, until 1886. From 1886 to 1921 he taught as a professor at the University of Greifswald and directed its pathological institute. He is remembered for early work with tissue cultures and for experiments in bacteriology, and his name lives on in the eponym Grawitz tumour, an old term for renal cell carcinoma, the common kidney cancer. He also wrote a history of the Greifswald medical faculty covering 1806 to 1906 and contributed a self-portrait to the 1923 collection Die Medizin der Gegenwart in Selbstdarstellungen. His younger brother Ernst Grawitz was a hematologist and his son-in-law Otto Busse was also a pathologist.