Eduard von Rindfleisch

Georg Eduard von Rindfleisch was a German pathologist and histologist, born in Köthen in 1836 and dead in Würzburg in 1908. He studied medicine at Würzburg, Berlin and Heidelberg, took his doctorate in 1859 and worked as an assistant to Rudolf Virchow before holding pathology chairs at Zurich, Bonn and, from 1874, Würzburg. In 1863 he noticed that the lesions of multiple sclerosis lay around veins, an early step toward a vascular theory of the disease. He also did pioneering research on tuberculosis and argued for a scientific neo-vitalism. His name survives in two eponyms, Rindfleisch's folds at the start of the aorta and Rindfleisch's cells, an old term for eosinophil white blood cells. His writings include a textbook of pathological histology issued in 1867.