Friedrich Sigmund Merkel

Friedrich Sigmund Merkel (1845 to 1919) was a leading German anatomist and histopathologist of the late nineteenth century. In 1875 he gave the first full description of the Tastzellen, the touch cells found in the skin of all vertebrates, which Robert Bonnet named Merkel cells in 1878. A native of Nürnberg, he took his medical doctorate at the University of Erlangen in 1869, qualified as a university lecturer in anatomy the following year, and held professorships at Rostock, Königsberg and Göttingen, where he worked under Jacob Henle and married Henle's daughter Anne. He wrote a multivolume textbook of human anatomy, originated the colour scheme still used in most anatomy texts, red for arteries, blue for veins and yellow for nerves, and introduced xylene as a clearing agent in histology. The term Merkel's spur is a synonym for the femoral calcar.