Gustav Albert Schwalbe

Gustav Albert Schwalbe was a German anatomist and anthropologist from Quedlinburg, born in 1844. He studied at the universities of Berlin, Zurich and Bonn, took his medical doctorate in 1866, and taught at Halle, Freiburg and Leipzig before holding professorships of anatomy at Jena from 1873, Königsberg from 1881 and Strassburg from 1883, where he died in 1916. In 1869 he injected Berlin-blue dye into the subarachnoid space of a dog and showed that the main routes by which cerebrospinal fluid is absorbed are lymphatic. Several anatomical structures carry his name, among them Schwalbe's spaces around the optic nerve, Schwalbe's nucleus, Schwalbe's ring and Schwalbe's line on the cornea, and he described Paneth cells in 1872, sixteen years before Joseph Paneth. His anthropological work led him to regard the Neanderthal as a direct ancestor of modern humans, and in 1899 he published an influential study of Pithecanthropus erectus, to the dismay of its discoverer Eugène Dubois.