Max Schultze

Max Schultze was a nineteenth century German anatomist who worked with the microscope and is remembered above all for his part in cell theory. Born in Freiburg im Breisgau in 1825 as the son of the anatomist Karl August Sigismund Schultze, he studied medicine at Greifswald and Berlin, became an associate professor of anatomy at the University of Halle in 1854 and, five years later, full professor of anatomy and histology and director of the Anatomical Institute at the University of Bonn, where he died in 1874. In 1865 he founded and edited the Archiv für mikroskopische Anatomie and refined the technical methods of the subject, including a heatable microscope stage used for studying blood, with which he gave the first accurate description of the platelet. His 1863 work on the protoplasm of the rhizopods and of plant cells argued that the animal sarcode described by Félix Dujardin and the vegetable protoplasm described by Hugo von Mohl were the same substance, and he defined the cell as a nucleated mass of protoplasm with or without a cell wall. He was the older brother of the obstetrician Bernhard Sigmund Schultze.