HENLE, JACOB

HENLE, JACOB (Friedrich Gustav; 1809–1885), German anatomist and pathologist. Henle, who is considered one of the outstanding histologists of his time, was a member of a well-known family in Bavaria and the grandson of the rabbi of Fuerth. He was baptized at the age of 11 by his parents. He studied   medicine at Bonn, and was the outstanding pupil, and later assistant, of Johannes Mueller. He moved with the latter to Berlin, where he was appointed lecturer of anatomy in 1837. From 1840 he served as professor of anatomy and physiology at Zurich, from 1844 at Heidelberg, and from 1852 at Goettingen. Henle was a great anatomist and one of the founders of modern medicine. The scope of his research work, from his first study of the cornea of the eye (1832) until the final one on the growth of man's nail and the horse's hoof (1884), was astonishing in its variety. His book, Allgemeine Anatomie (1841), was the first in which the study of the cell was presented as a professional branch, thus taking a definite step forward in medicine. While at Zurich, he founded the Zeitschrift fuer rationelle Medizin, in opposition to the obscure romantic medicine of his day. His anatomical discoveries were numerous and at least a dozen microscopic structures in anatomy were named after him. He summed up his life's work on anatomy in his great book Handbuch der systematischen Anatomie (1855–71). He also made contributions to pathology. His book, Pathologische Untersuchungen (1840) included, among others, a chapter on miasmas and infections, in which he first expressed (long before ways were found to stain and identify microbes) the theory that infectious diseases were caused by specific microorganisms, a contention that was to be proved 40 years later by his pupil Robert Koch. -BIBLIOGRAPHY: V. Robinson, Life of Jacob Henle (1921); S.R. Kagan, Jewish Medicine (1952), 147; R.H. Major, A History of Medicine (1954), 797–9. (Joshua O. Leibowitz)