Max Verworn

Max Verworn (1863 to 1921) was a German physiologist born in Berlin. He studied medicine and natural sciences in Berlin, then at Jena with Ernst Haeckel and William Thierry Preyer, and became a professor at Jena in 1895, at the physiological institute at Göttingen in 1901 and at Bonn in 1910, succeeding Eduard Pflüger. In 1902 he founded the Zeitschrift für Allgemeine Physiologie and published it until his death. He is remembered for experimental and especially cellular physiology, with extensive studies of the elementary processes in muscle tissue, nerve fibers and sensory organs, and for proposing conditionalism in opposition to causalism. He also investigated human creativity and thought, distinguishing physioplastic from ideoplastic artistic representation, and in 1896 he was the first recipient of the Carus Prize of the Leopoldina for his work in physiology.