(c) & Disclaimer: Note that this is a biased choice of dates relevant to biology, obtained by compiling many different sources, often using the original texts and not the WWW only; note that care has been taken to check information and rewrite it when needed, however it is likely that they still contain many errors; the links are chosen to be as diverse as possible, they do not engage the responsability of the author; please send comments and corrections here)

1800-1849

1875-1899

Causeries

1850 Augustus Volney Waller (Faversham 1816 - 1870) describes the microscopic appearance of degenerating nerve fibers after an axon is cut, when the distal portions of the fiber degenerate. This made it possible to trace the course of fibers through the nervous system and demonstrated the importance of the nucleus in the regeneration of nerve fibers.This process was subsequently termed "Wallerian degeneration".

1850 Extending Matteucci's observations, Emil du Bois-Reymond observes that muscle and nerves of animals during their state of activity produce electric currents which can be measured with the aid of the usual apparatus of electrophysics, the galvanometer. He records a resting electrical current in relaxed muscle and shows that this current diminishes when the muscle contracts. DuBois-Reymond terms this negative fluctuation in the current an "action potential".

1850-1855 Claude Bernard (Saint-Julien 1813 - Paris 1878), the successor of Magendie at the Collège de France, isolates glycogen from the liver, shows that it is converted into blood glucose, and discovers the process of gluconeogenesis.

1850-1855 Jean-Baptiste Boussingault, who had proved that the carbon in plants came from atmospheric CO₂, proposes that plant nitrogen comes from the soil. demonstrates that higher plants cannot utilize atmospheric nitrogen, but only nitrates from the soil. He also demonstrates the necessity of nitrogen for plants and animals. His experimental results were not conclusive, however, and conflicting data were soon published by another Parisian chemist, Ville, and popularized by Liebig. The question he resolved was whether the nitrogen that plants need to grow came from the soil or from the air. Joseph Priestley had argued, in the 18^th century, in favor of the air, and his opinion was seconded in the early 19^th century, by Liebig, then the world's most famous chemist.

1851 Heinrich Müller (1820 - Würzburg 1864) is first to describe the colored pigments in the retina.

1851 Louis Pasteur (Dôle 1822 - Villeneuve l'Etang 1895) publishes a memoir on aspartic and malic acids.

1851 Marchese Alfonso Corti (1822 - 1876) using a microscope, discovers that the inner ear is filled with fluid and that the tiny hair cells that are the true sensory elements of the inner ear on a structure later named "organ of Corti".

1851 Theodore Maximillian Bilharz (1825 - 1862) working at the Kasr-el-Aini hospital in Cairo decribes schistosomiasis, often named after him "bilharziose".

1851 Helmholtz invents the ophthalmoscope.

1852 Rudolf Albrecht von Kölliker (1817 - Würzburg 1905), Swiss anatomist and physiologist, publishes an influential textbook on cell theory, the Handbuch der Gewebelehre (Manual of Histology). He later published a text on embryology, in which he interpreted the developing embryo in terms of cell theory.

1852 In association with Kölliker, Karl Theodor Ernst von Siebold (1804-1885) creates the journal Zeitschrift für wissenschaftliche Zoologie, where the latter describes for the first time the schistosome parasite. Elie Mechnikov, later, studied in his laboratory.

1852 Auguste Comte uses the concept of "altruisme" (perhaps created by his teacher Andrieux) later used in sociobiology and in population biology.

1852 Helmholtz measures the speed of nervous impulses.

1852 Lucien Corvisart (?-?) coins the term "tétanie" to describe the contraction induced by tétanos or other diseases with similar clinical sign.

1852 Gottlob Friedrich Heinrich Küchenmeister (1821- Dresden 1890) identifies the cause of trichinosis by demonstrating that cysticerci of bladderworms are the preadult forms of taeniid cestodes. To prove his theory of deadend taenia development, he later made experiments on prisoners, which was deeply resented by some of his contemporaries.

1852 Hermann Friedrich Stannius (1808 - 1883) ties ligatures between the sinus venosus (the heart pace maker) and the atrium, and between the auricles and the ventricles of a frog heart, and demonstrates that the sinus is the pacemaker of the heart, yet the auricles and ventricles are capable of independent, spontaneous contractions.

1852 Karl Friedrich Wilhelm Ludwig (Hessen 1816 - Leipzig 1895) summarizes his views on physiology (using the graphical method he invented to measure fluxes) in his Lehrbuch der Physiologie. In this book he starts with the Physiologie der Atome where he stresses the importance of basic chemistry in life. Then follows a chapter on Physiologie der Aggregatszustände which deals with dissolution, diffusion and currents. Thus, in parallel with the other major physiologist of his time, Claude Bernard, he sees life as a physico-chemical process.

1852 Kölliker describes how motor nerves originate from the neurons in the anterior horn of the spinal cord.

1852-1864 Emile Blanchard (1819-1900) publishes his treaty L'organisation du règne animal.

1853 Pasteur, in a series of memoirs, discovers the origin of "racemic acid" and shows how tartaric acid can become racemic acid. He also discovers the action of tartaric acid on polarised light.

1853 Ludwig Karol Teichmann (1823-1895), in Krakow, Poland, develops the first microscopic crystal test for hemoglobin using hemin crystals. This test has since been much used in forensic medicine.

1853 George Meissner (1829 - Göttingen 1905) describes sensory nerve endings later known as "Meissner's corpuscles".

1854 Heinrich Schröder (?-?) and Theodor von Dusch (?-?), then Schröder alone in 1959 repeat Helmholtz filtration experiment and show that living particles can be removed from air by filtering it through cotton-wool.

1854 Pasteur discovers microbial fermentation of beet sugar.

1854 Louis Pierre Gratiolet (1815-1865) traces visual radiation from thalamus to occipital cortex and describes convolutions of the cerebral cortex (Mémoire sur les Plis Cérébraux de l'Homme et des Primates. Paris: Bertrand)

1854 Snow shows that the London cholera epidemic is caused by a single pump.

1855 Bartolomeo Panizza (1785-1867) publishes his Osservazioni sul nervo ottico (Observations on the Optic Nerve) where he shows the occipital lobe is essential for vision.

1855 Claude Bernard states that all organs liberate into the tissue fluids special substances which assist in maintaining the constancy of the milieu intérieur (internal environment). This was later known as hormone factors.

1855 Richard Heschl (?-?) describes the transverse gyri in the temporal lobe (primary auditory cortex, Heschl's gyrus).

1855 Having discovered a disease caused by insufficiency of the adrenal cortex in 1849, Thomas Addison (1793-1860) describes the syndrome associated with the deterioration of the human adrenal cortex (Addison's disease) and later pernicious anemia (Addison's anemia).

1856 Nathanael Pringsheim (1823–1894), founder of the German Botanical Society and the Jahrbücher für wissenschaftliche Botanik, observes pollen penetration of the egg of Oedogonium.

1856 Lucien Corvisart describes trypsin and uses pepsin therapeutically.

1856 Valine is isolated by Eugen Franz Freih von Gorup-Besanez (1817 - 1878).

1856 William Perkin (?-?) prepares the first of the aniline dyes, eosin. This dye would later prove useful for selectively staining cytoplasmic proteins.

1856 Edme Félix Alfred Vulpian (1826-1887) applies a solution of ferric chloride to slices of the adrenal glands and notes that the medulla stained green while the cortex did not. He also notes that the same reaction is given by samples of venous blood leaving the adrenal, but not by arterial blood entering the gland. To account for these observations, he assumed that the medulla synthesized a substance that was liberated into the circulation.

1856 Karl Ludwig develops perfusion techniques for keeping animal organs alive after their removal from the body. He also invented the kymograph, mercurial blood pump and a device for measuring the rate of blood flow. Ludwig is the first to study the role of the nervous system in blood flow as well as secretory functions.

1856 Workers quarrying for limestone in the Neander Valley near Düsseldorf discover the first Neanderthal remains.

1857 Kölliker discovers "sarcosomes" (mitochondria) in muscle cells.

1857 Franz von Leydig (Rothenburg, 1821 - Bonn 1908) Professor of Histology in Würzburg and later in Tübingen and Bonn, the founder of Comparative Histology describes the interstitial cells of the testis (Leydig's Cells) in his Lehrbuch der Histologie des Menschen.

1857 Henri Etienne Sainte-Claire Deville (St. Thomas Antilles1818 - Boulogne 1881) establishes thermal dissociation of chemicals.

1857 Claude Bernard demonstrates the formation and decomposition of glycogen by the liver. This is the first demonstration of a catabolic process.

1857 After a memoir on amylic acid, Pasteur's Mémoire sur la fermentation appelée lactique demonstrates that lactic acid fermentation is carried out by living bacteria. This memoir is considered as the founding paper of the science of Microbiology. Interestingly this same year Pasteur's application is refused by the French Académie des Sciences.

1858 Stanislao Cannizzaro (Palermo 1826 - Roma 1910) develops the study of organic chemicals, and demonstrates the validity of Avogadro's number.

1858 Félix Joseph Henri de Lacaze-Duthiers (1821 - 1901) assistant of Milne-Edwards, professor at Lille, then Paris, finds that three Mediterranean mollusks produce purple-blue dyes. One, Murex trunculus, is determined by him (and other scientists, archeologists and historians) to be the source of the ancient Biblical blue. He creates the Stations de BiologieMarine at Banyuls and Roscoff in France, where many reknown biologists were later to work. La science n'a ni religion ni politique was the motto written on the door of his laboratory.

1858 Pasteur notes that Penicillium molds ferment only dextrotartaric acid and do not attack the levo isomer. Thus he develops a practical method for separating compounds which are identical except for the spatial arrangement of the substituent group. More importantly this tells him that life processes are original : "La dissymétrie c'est la vie".

1858 Carmine, a commercially available red basic stain, is found to stain cell nuclei more intensely than the cytoplasm.

1858 Rudolf Virchow (Schivelbein (now Swidwin) 1821 - Berlin 1902) applies the cell theory to problems of pathology and disease and set forth the illuminating principle that the outward symptoms of disease are merely the reflections of impairment at the level of cellular organization. He also advanced the notion that all cells arise from pre-existing cells: "Omnis cellula e cellula."

1858 Friedrich August Kekulé von Stradonitz (Darmstadt 1829 – Bonn 1896) proposes that carbon atoms can form chains and develops a structural theory based on two-dimensional arrangement of atoms and bonds.

1858 Philip Lutley Sclater (1829-1913) founds Ibis, the journal of the British Ornithological Union and studies the geographical distribution of birds.

1858 Joint announcement by Charles Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace (Usk 1823 - Broadstone 1913) of the theory of natural selection.

1858 Garlic’s role in fighting disease was recorded in China almost 15 centuries ago. Pasteur describes garlic’s antibiotic qualities again.

1859 Charles Darwin's On the Origin of Species argues for natural selection as a factor in organic evolution. More importantly, it establishes evolution as an acceptable theory in the minds of most naturalists.

1859 Adolf Wilhelm Hermann Kolbe (1818-1884) synthesizes salicylic acid from phenol.

1860 Albert Niemann (?-?) purifies cocaine and later introduces it as a tonic/elixir in a patent.

1860 Gustav Theodor Fechner (Gross-Särchen 1801 - Lipsia 1887) in his Elemente der Psychophysik develops what was later known as "Fechner's law", a psychophysical generalization that states that the intensity of subjective sensation increases as the logarithm of the stimulus intensity.

1860 Pasteur states his aphorism, "Omne vivum e vivo." He starts his long series of experiments on the "Générations dites spontanées". In his two lectures dedicated to J.-B. Biot, Recherches sur la Dissymétrie moléculaire des Produits organiques naturels, Pasteur describes the epistemological background of his discovery of the importance of dissymmetry in life. He clearly states how Science must proceed in a hypothesis-driven way, emphasizing that facts cannot exist as such, but can only be observed once a hypothesis about the nature of a phenomenon is formed in the mind of the scientist.

1860 Wallace claims that a sharp boundary exists between the Australian and Oriental faunal regions. The "Wallace line of faunal delimitation" separates the Philippines from the Sanghir Islands and Borneo from Celebes, and runs through part of the Malay Archipelago.

1861 Jean Louis René Antoine Édouard Claparède (1832 - 1871), discovers giant axons in annelid worms.

1861 John Stuart Mill (London 1806 - 1873) publishes Utilitarianism, which follows his System of Logic (1843) : " To the Deductive Method, thus characterized in its three constituent parts: Induction, Ratiocination, and Verification, the human mind is indebted for its most conspicuous triumphs in the investigation of nature. To it we owe all the theories by which vast and complicated phenomena are embraced under a few simple laws, which, considered as the laws of those great phenomena, could never have been detected by their direct study. (Logic, Book III. Chapter XI. Section 3). ", with a most factual view of knowledge and values.

1861 Pasteur, Mémoire sur les corpuscules organisés qui existent dans l'atmosphère. He also discovers life in the absence of air: Animalcules infusoires vivant sans gaz oxygène et déterminant des fermentations. For the second time his application is rejected by the Académie des Sciences.

1861 Thomas Graham (Glasgow 1805 - 1869)'s work on understanding the colloidal state of matter advances the understanding of protoplasmic systems. He later discovered the formula of ozone.

1861 Thomas Henry Huxley (Ealing 1825 - 1895), who had opposed Owen in his hypothesis that the cranium was derived from vertebrae coins term "calcarine sulcus". He nevertheless emphasizes, contrary to Darwin, that evolution can proceed in a saltatory fashion. As an example he uses the observation made by Réaumur of the existence of polydactyly. This was much later understood to be the result of mutations in an homeogene.

1861 Max Johann Sigismund Schultze (Freiberg 1825 - 1874) establishes the protoplasm concept and, after noting the essential similarity between the cell contents of protozoa, plants and animals, concludes that "the cell is an accumulation of living substance or protoplasm definitely delimited in space and possessing a cell membrane and nucleus."

1861 Paul Broca (1824-1880) begins his famous series where he discusses cortical localization. Broca persuades the majority of his colleagues world-wide that there is a relatively circumscribed center, located in the posterior and inferior convolutions of the left frontal lobe (later named Broca's speech area), which is responsible for speech (langage articulé).

1861 The still contentious discovery of fossil remains of Archaeopteryx lithographica is made in jurassic limestone deposits in a stone quarry in Solnhofen, Germany.

1862 Having discovered that the green color of plants is distributed into corpuscules, Julius von Sachs (1832–1897) produces experimental evidence that starch is a product of photosynthesis.

1862 William Withey Gull (Thorpe Le Soken 1816 - 1890), who later described anorexia nervosa, gives the clinical signs of the spinal chord disease syringomyelia.

1862 William Thomson (Lord Kelvin) (Belfast 1824 - Glasgow 1907) using the theory of Jean-Baptiste Fourier on thermal conduction, computes the age of the solar system as 25 million years (later revised to 40 million years).

1862 James Clerk Maxwell (Edinburgh 1831 - Cambridge 1879) states "We can scarcely avoid the conclusion that light consists in the transverse undulations of the same medium which is the cause of electric and magnetic phenomena." Much of the laws governing electromagnetic fields owe to his work. He is also known for Maxwell's devil, which plays an imortant role in the definition of information (wrongly identified as directly related to entropy).

1862 Max Joseph von Pettenkofer (1818–1901) develops techniques for hygiene, in particular for controlling gases. With an apparatus for analyzing respiratory gas exchange, thus making possible evaluation of energy consumption by the determination of respiratory quotients.

1862 Henry Walter Bates (1825-1892) observes mimicry (now known as batesian mimicry) of distasteful or poisonous brazilian butterflies by harmless, palatable species in the lepidoptera and suggests that the mimics are protected from predation because of their resemblance to the harmfulm species.

1863 Ivan Mikhailovich Sechenov (1829-1905), the father of Russian physiology, publishes Reflexes of the Brain.

1863 The word "scientist" is coined to complement that of "artist".

1863 Karl Remigius Fresenius (1818 - 1897) uses a solid culture medium (potato) for growing micro-organisms.

1863 Casimir Joseph Davaine (1812- Paris, 1882) discovers small stick-shaped formations in the blood of animals affected by anthrax shows that the disease in sheep is caused by blood 'bacteridia'.

1863 Nikolaus Friedreich (1825-1882) describes a progressive hereditary degenerative Central Nervous System disorder (Friedreich's ataxia).

1864 John Hughlings Jackson (Green Hammerton 1835 - London 1911), considered as the father of English neurology, describes the loss of speech after brain injury.

1864 Ernst Heinrich Haeckel (Potsdam 1834 - Jena 1919) the father of many terms still in use, outlines the essential elements of modern zoological classification.

1864 Jacques Boucher de Perthes (1788-1868) publishes, with a forword by Charles Lyell L'Ancienneté de l'homme. L'homme fossile en France, communications faites à l'Institut (Académie des Sciences).

1864 Schultze describes the fine cytoplasmic tubes that connect the protoplasts of adjacent plant cells by passing through their walls (plasmodesmata).

1864 Pasteur's demolishes the doctrine of spontaneous generation: "J'ai la prétention de démontrer avec rigueur que dans toutes les expériences où l'on a cru reconnaître l'existence de générations spontanées, chez les êtres les plus inférieurs, où le débat se trouve aujourd'hui relégué, l'observateur a été victime d'illusions ou de causes d'erreur qu'il n'a pas aperçues ou qu'il n'a pas su éviter. "

1864 Controversy between Karl Wilhelm von Nägeli (Kilchberg Swizerland 1817 - München 1891) and Robert Koch (Clausthal 1843 - Baden-Baden 1910) regarding the existence of two or more structural forms during their life cycle (pleomorphism) versus genetic distinctness of bacteria. This controversy was to last for eighty years, until it was discovered that bacteria behave as all living organisms do in terms of heredity.

1864 Ernst Felix Immanuel Hoppe-Seyler (Freyburg 1825 - 1895) performs the first crystallization of what he named a "proteid": hemoglobin.

1865 Kekulé devises a ring model for the structural formula of benzene, supposedly after dreaming about six monkeys holding one another by the tail.

1865 Karl August Möbius (1825-1908) creates the modern system and methodes of ecology in his study Die Fauna der Kieler Bucht.

1865 Böhmer (?-?) finds that the stain alum hematoxylin stains cell nuclei more strongly than their cytoplasm.

1865 Otto Friedrich Karl Deiters (1834-1863) differentiates dendrites and axons and describes the lateral vestibular nucleus (Deiter's nucleus).

1865-1866 Karl Wilhelm von Kupffer (München 1829 - München 1902), Anatomist and Embryologist, Professor of Anatomy in Kiel (1867), in Königsberg (1875) and in Munich (1880) describes the "stellate cells" in the lining of blood channels in the liver (Kupffer's Cells) in the Archive für mikroscopische Anatomie.

1865-1867 Joseph Lister (1827-1912) institutes the practice of antiseptic surgery and the use of carbolic acid as a disinfectant) uses carbolic acid as an antiseptic.

1866 Thomas Clifford Allbutt (1836-?) invents the clinical mercury thermometer, regretting that it is often used with the inconvenient Farenheit scale.

1866 Johann Gregor Mendel (Heinzendorf 1823 - Brno 1884) publishes his investigations of plant hybrids and their subsequent behavior. His fundamental discoveries lay forgotten for 34 years.

1866 Schultze, having discovered the existence of two types of receptor cells in the retina, formulates the so-called duplicity theory of vision. He had noticed that in diurnal birds the retina consisted mainly of cones but nocturnal birds possessed a retina with an abundance of rods. This led him to propose that cones must respond to colored light while rods should be more sensitive to black and white.

1866 Haeckel hypothesizes that the nucleus of a cell transmits its hereditary information. He first uses the term "ecology" to describe the study of living organisms and their interactions with other organisms and with their environment.

1866 Aleksandr Onufriyevich Kovalevsky (1840 - 1901) shows the similarity between the lancelet (Amphioxus lanceolatus) and the larval stages of tunicates and establishes the chordate status of the tunicates.

1866 Pasteur publishes his Etudes sur le vinaigre.

1866 John Langdon Haydon Down (Tor Point 1828 - 1896) publishes the description of "congenital idiots". He investigates what is now know as "Down's syndrome", due to triplication of all or part of chromosome 21 in man.

1866 Owen publishes On the Anatomy of Vertebrates.

1867 Johann Friedrich Miescher (Basel 1844 - 1895), discovers "nuclein" that is soluble in alkali but not in acids in the pus of wounds of soldiers of the war at Sebastopol. Friedrich Miescher isolated a substance which he called "nuclein" from the nuclei of white blood cells . This substance came to be known as nucleic acid. Miescher later discovered that the amount of carbon dioxide in the blood affects the respiratory rate.

1867 Kovalevsky extends the germ layer concept of Christian Heinrich Pander and von Baer to include the invertebrates, establishing an important embryologic unity in the animal kingdom.

1867 Theodore Meynert (1833-1898) under whom later Sigmund Freud learned brain anatomy, performs histological analysis of the cerebral cortex.

1868 Darwin elaborates the theory of pangenesis to explain cell differentiation and evolution and gives it its name.

1868 Helmholtz proposes the resonance theory of hearing.

1868 Joseph Arthur de Gobineau (1816-1882), surprizing with his mixture of linguistic and penetrating biological views states in his Mémoires sur diverses manifestations de la vie individuelle that «Après l'entozoaire spermatique, il y a la cellule, dernier terme jusqu'ici découvert à l'état génésiaque, et la cellule n'est pas moins le principe formateur du règne végétal que du règne animal.», thus spreading the cell theory in the domain of Art and Literature.

1868 Julius Bernstein (1839-1917), repeating von Helmoltz's velocity measurement, makes the hypothesis that a nerve impulse is a localized region of "depolarization," a "wave of negativity", due to the existence of a "transmembrane potential." He measures the time course of the action potential.

1868 Boussingault points out that plants require oxygen for photosynthesis.

1869 Paul Langerhans (Berlin 1847 - Funchal 1888), later a Physician and an Anatomist, Professor of Pathological Anatomy in Freiburg publishes his doctoral thesis on the structure of the pancreas, where he notes specialized groups or islands of cells which produce insulin and glucagon and that are especially well supplied with microscopic blood vessels (Islets of Langerhans); he also describes the fundamental dendritic cells found in the epidermis of the skin (Cells of Langerhans) in a publication of the Beitrag zur mikroskopischen Anatomie der Bauchspeicheldruse.

1869 Jean Louis Rodolphe Agassiz (Motier 1807 - Cambridge (USA) 1873) exposes his views in De l'Espece et de la Classification en Zoologie, in which he attacks Darwin's approach to evolution (Chapter 7: Le Darwinisme).

1869 Francis Galton (Birmingham, 1822 - London 1911), cousin of Charles Darwin, claims that intelligence is inherited as a straightforward trait (publication of Hereditary Genius)

1870 Eduard Hitzig (1838-1907) and Gustav Fritsch (1839–1927) in their article "On the Electrical Excitability of the Cerebrum" the cortical motor area of the dog using electrical stimulation.

1870 Justus von Liebig (Darmstadt 1803 - München 1873) proposes that all ferments are chemical reactions rather than vital processes. This will start a bitter controversy between Claude Bernard (who agrees with Liebig) and Pasteur (who thinks that life is needed for fermentation).

1870 Jean Louis Armand de Quatrefages de Bréau (Berthezène 1810 - Paris 1892) publishes Charles Darwin et ses précurseurs français where he strongly attacks darwinism and maintains a theory of the Unity of Man.

1870 Wallace publishes his Contributions to the Theory of Natural Selection

1870 Herbert Spencer (Derby 1820 -) publishes A System of Synthetic Philosophy, where he advocates darwinism in a form which distorts its premisses, stating that evolution proceeds through the "selection of the fittest". His positivist system, which is reminiscent of that of Auguste Comte, and tries to associate all sciences and philosophy together in a single picture, states that the unifying principle is evolution from a state of homogeneity to one of heterogeneity. The implicit underlying causality principle is of a definite Lamarckian flavour (there is, of course, no "fittest"...).

1870 Ernst von Bergmann (1836-1907) writes the first textbook on nervous system surgery.

1870 In 1863, Jean-Baptiste André Dumas (Alès 1800 - Cannes 1884), Pasteur's teacher, and a member of the Senate as well as a distinguished chemist, had requested that Pasteur leaves Paris for the south of France to study silkworm diseases. This resulted in the Etude sur la maladie des vers à soie in which Pasteur describes a method still in use today to prevent the disease, pébrine, caused by Microsporidia Nosema bombycis.

1871 Silas Weir Mitchell (Philadelphia 1829 - 1914) provides a detailed account of the phantom limb syndrome.

1871 Pasteur conclusively demonstrates that yeast is necessary for fermentation as it can be carried out in its presence only. He distinguishes two kinds of ferments, "organized ferments" such as yeast or lactic acid bacteria, and "unorganized ferments" like pepsin and amylase. This starts a violent debate with Edmond Frémy and Auguste Trécul.

1871 Louis-Antoine Ranvier (1835-1922) describes nerve fiber constriction ("noeuds de Ranvier")

1871 Lambert Adolphe Jacques Quételet (Gand 1796 - Bruxelles 1874), who had organized the first international statistics conference in 1853, shows the importance of statistical analysis in biology and sets the foundation of biometry. The Quetelet index is used to measure obesity.

1871 Hallopeau (?-?) coins the word "antibiotique" to express the concept of subtances opposede to the development of life. The word "antibiotic" existed in English with an entirely different meaning ("opposed to the belief of life in another place, e.g. extraterrestrial life". The word was scantly used, until Waksman in 1941- 1942 used it to qualify the substances acting against microbes such as Penicillin.

1871 Publication of Charles Darwin's The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex, in which the role of sexual selection in evolution is described for the first time.

1872 C. Ore (?-?) uses chloral hydrate as an intravenous anesthetic.

1872 Richard Dedekind (Brunswick 1831 - 1916) 's Stetigkeit un irrationale Zahlen establishes that there is a conceptual discontinuity between rational numbers and "real" numbers. This work is a landmark in the double view of mathematics as constructed from axioms or as the result of algorithms.

1872 Ferdinand Julius Cohn (Breslau 1828 - Breslau 1898) in his Researches on Bacteria coins the term "bacterium" and founds the study of bacteriology.

1872 Karl Ludwig and Eduard Friedrich Wilhelm Pflüger (1829-1910) study the processes of gas exchange in the blood and show that oxidation occurs in the tissues rather than in the blood.

1872 Anton Dohrn (Stettin 1840 - 1909) founds the Stazione Zoologica in Napoli.

1872 Karl Joseph Eberth (1835-1927) shows that anthrax can be filtered from blood.

1872 George Huntington (1850-1916) describes the symptoms of a hereditary chorea ("danse de Saint-Guy").

1872 The British Navy corvette H.M.S. Challenger leaves from Portsmouth for an expedition that greatly extended our knowledge of the extent and variety of marine life (1872-1876). The expedition is directed by Scottish professor Charles Wyville Thompson (1830-1885) and naturalist John Murray (1841-1914), a Canadian.

1872 Félix-Joseph Henri de Lacaze-Duthiers (1821-1901) creates the Roscoff marine biology laboratory which played a fundamental role in the institutionalization of marine biology in the last decades of the 19th century, thanks as well to the diffusion of the results realized with the publication of the Archives de zoologie expérimentale.

1873 Camillo Golgi (Corteno 1843-1926) publishes his first study on the potassium bichromate / silver nitrate method to colour cells ('la reazione nera").

1873 Charles Robin (?-?), the first titular of the Histology chair at the Faculty of Medicine in Paris publishes an important Dictionnaire de Médecine, still explicitely reticent towards the cell theory. He supposes that cells derive from an initial structure which is not cellular in nature.

1873 Joseph Achille Le Bel (1847 - 1930) and Jacobus Henricus van't Hoff (Rotterdam 1852 - Steglitz 1911) independently invent the theory of asymmetric carbon, to account explicitely for the existence of stereoisomers, stemming from the foundation of stereochemistry pioneered by Louis Pasteur.

1873 Anton Schneider (?-?) shows by adding acetic acid to fertilized eggs of the plathelmith Mesostomum ehrenbergii that nuclear filaments (chromosomes) during cell division move and change. His account is the first accurate description of the process of mitosis in animal cells, showing that the nucleus disappears and that it changes to a bulk of thin threads subsequently becoming thicker and differentiating along an axis through the cell.

1874 Vladimir Alekseyevich Betz (1831-1894) describes pyramidal cells in the primary motor cortex of the brain.

1874 Roberts Bartholow (1831-1904) in his "Experimental investigations into the functions of the human brain" describes how he could not resist to electrically stimulate human cortical tissue, and describes the outcome of the experiment.

1874 Carl Wernicke (Tarnowitz 1848 - Thüringer Wald 1904) publishes Der Aphasische Symptomencomplex on aphasias.

1874 K.L. Kahlbaum (1828-1899) describes a clinical form of early dementia, katatonie, (subsequently introduced in French and English in 1888: catatonie and katatonie)

1874 William Benjamin Carpenter (1813-1885) publishes his Principles of Mental Physiology where he proposes the "sensory ganglion" (thalamus) as seat of consciousness.

1874 Gull recognizes and describes the disease known as Gull's disease - myxoedema with the atrophy of the thyroid gland - which he regards correctly as the adult form of cretinism. He also describes anorexia.

1874 Wilhelm His (Basel 1831 - 1904) in Über unsere Körperform suggests mechanical explanations for morphological changes in the embryo.

1874 Albert Wigand (1812 - 1886) in Der Darwinismus strongly opposes Darwin's idea, trying to bring out the weaknesses underlying the theory of selection, and maintaining the existence of a definite course and plan in evolution.

1874 Haeckel establishes the taxonomic position of the Chordata, and proposes the "Gastrea" as the hypothetical ancestor to all metazoa.

1874 Gottlob Frege's (1848 - 1925) Die Grundlagen der Artithmetik is an elaborate attempt to characterize integers and link them to logic.

1874 John Hughlings Jackson (1835- 1911) after the discovery of aphasia by Wernicke maintains in On the nature of the duality of the brain (Medical Press and Circular) that the right hemisphere has special functions.

Some significant dates 1875-1899

1800-1849

1875-1899

Home