Friedrich Gustav Jakob Henle

Friedrich Gustav Jakob Henle was a German physician, pathologist and anatomist, born in Furth in 1809 and dead in Gottingen in 1885, remembered above all for the loop of Henle, the hairpin section of the kidney tubule that bears his name. He took his doctorate at Bonn in 1832, worked as prosector to Johannes Muller in Berlin, and then held chairs of anatomy at Zurich, Heidelberg and Gottingen. His Manual of Rational Pathology treated physiology and pathology as branches of one science, and his Handbook of Systematic Human Anatomy became one of the most complete anatomical works of its day. In his 1840 essay on miasmas and contagia he argued that living microscopic organisms could cause infectious disease, an early statement of the germ theory, and his student Robert Koch later carried the idea into the laboratory.