In 1837 Du Bois-Reymond began his studies at the University of Berlin, where, at first, somewhat undecided about his future, he attended lectures in theology, philosophy, and psychology. On February 10, 1843 Du Bois-Reymond received his degree with a historical-literary paper on electric fishes.
Gallery of Emil Du Bois-Reymond
During a short period at the University of Bonn (1838-1839), Du Bois-Reymond studied logic, metaphysics, and anthropology, in addition to botany, geology, geography, and meteorology.
Career
Gallery of Emil Du Bois-Reymond
Frog-leg galvanoscope, taken from Du Bois-Reymond.
Achievements
A commemorative plaque of Du Bois-Reymond in Berlin, Germany.
Membership
Royal Prussian Academy of Sciences
1851
Du Bois-Reymond was elected to membership in the Royal Prussian Academy of Sciences in 1851.
Royal Society
Du Bois-Reymond was a member of the Royal Society.
Saint Petersburg Academy of Sciences
Du Bois-Reymond was a member of the Saint Petersburg Academy of Sciences.
Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences
Du Bois-Reymond was a member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences.
Hungarian Academy of Sciences
Du Bois-Reymond was a member of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences.
American Academy of Arts and Sciences
Du Bois-Reymond was a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
Lincean Academy
Du Bois-Reymond was a member of the Lincean Academy.
Russian Academy of Sciences
Du Bois-Reymond was a member of the Russian Academy of Sciences.
Bavarian Academy of Sciences and Humanities
Du Bois-Reymond was a member of the Bavarian Academy of Sciences and Humanities.
Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences
Du Bois-Reymond was a member of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences.
Awards
Pour le Mérite for Sciences and Arts
Du Bois-Reymond was awarded the order Pour le Mérite for Sciences and Arts.
Bavarian Maximilian Order for Science and Art
Du Bois-Reymond was awarded the Bavarian Maximilian Order for Science and Art in 1873.
In 1837 Du Bois-Reymond began his studies at the University of Berlin, where, at first, somewhat undecided about his future, he attended lectures in theology, philosophy, and psychology. On February 10, 1843 Du Bois-Reymond received his degree with a historical-literary paper on electric fishes.
During a short period at the University of Bonn (1838-1839), Du Bois-Reymond studied logic, metaphysics, and anthropology, in addition to botany, geology, geography, and meteorology.
Emil Du Bois-Reymond was a German physician and physiologist. This distinguished scientist is remembered as a founder of modern electrophysiology, and is also known for his research on electrical activity in nerve and muscle fibres.
Background
Emil Du Bois-Reymond was born on November 7, 1818 in Berlin, Germany. His father, Felix Henri Du Bois-Reymond, moved from Neuehâtel, Switzerland (then part of Prussia), to Berlin in 1804 and became a teacher at the Kadettenhaus. Later he was the representative from Neuchâtel to the Prussian government, and in 1832 he published a fundamental work on linguistics. His orthodox Pietism and authoritarian manner soon aroused his son’s spirit of resistance.
His mother, the former Minette Henry, was the daughter of the minister who served the French colony in Berlin and the granddaughter of Daniel Chodowiecki, a well-known artist. He had two sisters, Julie and Felicie, and two brothers; his brother Paul became a distinguished mathematician.
The family’s background made them feel that they belonged to the French colony in Berlin, as they usually spoke French at home.
Education
Du Bois-Reymond attended the French academic high school in Berlin, except for a year in Neuchâtel. In 1837 he began his studies at the University of Berlin, where, at first, somewhat undecided about his future, he attended lectures in theology, philosophy, and psychology. During a short period at the University of Bonn (1838-1839), he studied logic, metaphysics, and anthropology, in addition to botany, geology, geography, and meteorology.
In the winter semester of 1839, having returned to Berlin, he was inspired by Eduard Hallmann, assistant to the anatomist Johannes Müller, to study medicine. It was also Hallmann who taught him the basic principles of osteology and botany and worked out a schedule of the lectures he should attend. His letters to Hallmann are splendid proof of Du Bois-Reymond’s intellectual liveliness, but they also show his initial uncertainty about his course of study and his own talents. He was easily influenced and was able only slowly to eradicate the prejudice for Müller that he had acquired from Hallmann.
Du Bois-Reymond was soon acquainted with such teachers and researchers as Heinrich Dove, Theodor Schwann, and Matthias Schleiden, and became a close friend of Ernst Brücke, Hermann Helmholtz, Karl Bogislaus Reichert, and Carl Ludwig. In 1840 he worked more closely with Müller, concerning himself with anatomical preparations, comparative anatomy, physiology, and microscopy. He was still very interested in morphology. During this period he also studied the philosophical writings of Hegel and Schelling with great interest and attended the clinical lectures of Dieft'enbach and Johann Schönlein, among others.
On February 10, 1843 Du Bois-Reymond received his degree with a historical-literary paper on electric fishes. This was a subsidiary result of his interest in the history of animal electricity and also a preliminary study for the experimental verification, recommended to him by Müller, of the new papers of Carlo Matteucci, who in 1840 had published his Essai sur les phénomènes électriques des animaux.
Du Bois-Reymond’s study of Essai sur les phénomènes électriques des animaux marked the start of his lifelong, almost monomaniacal experimental analysis of animal electricity. It occupied him constantly from 1840 to 1850; and in the course of his work he developed a strong preference for experimental physics, particularly the application of physical principles and methods of measurement to the problems of physiology. He was encouraged greatly in this by Brücke and later by Helmholtz. On January 14, 1845 he founded the Physikalische Gesellschaft with Brücke, Dove, and others in Berlin. In December 1845 he met Helmholtz and was deeply impressed by him.
Du Bois-Reymond’s first experimental and theoretical investigations of animal electricity produced definite conclusions in November 1842. Upon Müller’s advice the results were hurriedly submitted for publication in Poggendorff’s Annalen der Physik und Chemie, appearing as “Abriss einer Untersuchung über den sogenannten Froschstrom und über die electrischen Fische” in January 1843. Through Humboldt he also sent an extract to the Académie des Sciences in Paris.
Du Bois-Reymond’s interest in molecular physics led him to lecture during almost every summer semester from 1856, on the “physics of organic metabolism.” This involved such processes as diffusion of gases and liquids, diffusion through pores, adsorption, the theory of solutions, capillarity, surface tension, swelling, osmosis, and secretion. The lectures, which were edited by his son René (1900), show his interest in the subject and make one aware that his intellectual effort belonged completely to the period up to the end of the 1860s. His last decades were, for the most part, filled with other work and problems that were much less those of physiology than general problems of scientific knowledge, problems of methods and limitations, and historical questions.
Du Bois-Reymond’s interpretation of the basic molecular processes was analogous to Ampere’s interpretation of the magnet. He believed that the muscle fiber was made up of numerous peripolar electromotive molecules, each thought to consist of a positive equatorial zone and two negative polar zones. For the tendons he assumed electrically neutral parelectronomic molecules. When Hermann was able to demonstrate the lack of current in intact muscle fibers in 1867-1868, Du Bois-Reymond tried in vain to save his theory of preexistence by means of additional as-sumptions. In any case, he interpreted the currents from intact, injured, and contracting muscles as having a single cause.
Because of the extremely high sensibility of his multiplier, he was able in 1849 to show the injury current also in the nerve. He succeeded further in demonstrating the “negative fluctuation” in tetanized nerves and thus proved the electric nature of the Nervenprinzip.
Du Bois-Reymond also discovered that polarization occurs at the points of entry and exit during the flow of direct current through a nerve. It is shown in a change of charge at and near the positive and negative poles of the section through which the current flows. This “electrotonus” was the subject of his work for many years, and his pupil Pflüger continued to investigate the subject intensively. In connection with this Du Bois-Reymond proposed the thesis that the effect of the electrical stimulation, apart from the polarization, depends upon the slope of the change in intensity of the current at the point of stimulation, and not upon the duration or the absolute intensity of the current. After 1869, when Wilhelm Krause developed the theory that the transmission of stimulation from nerves to the muscle fiber is the result of an electrical discharge of the end plate, Du Bois-Reymond also pursued these questions. He considered it possible for a chemical mechanism for transmitting stimulation to exist along with the electrical mechanism.
Quite a large part of Du Bois-Reymond’s research concerned the explanation of the nature and origin of the shock given by electric fishes. Many papers, particularly after 1877, written with Sachs and Fritsch are concerned with the anatomy and the production of electricity in these creatures. From 1857 he studied living examples of the Malapterurus electricus (electric catfish), the torpedo, and the Gymnotus electricus.
His most significant achievement was introducing clear physical methods and concepts into electrophysiology. In 1842-1843 he described (incorrectly at first) an autogenous current from the intact surface of the muscle to the tendon and (correctly) the injury current between the surface and the cross section; he used a multiplier that he had coiled and improved himself. He found this current even in the smallest pieces of muscle and traced it correctly to the individual muscle fibers, the interior of which is negative with respect to the surface of the fibers. The contracting muscle thus reveals a change, the so-called “negative fluctuation” of the injury current (1849). It occurs during every muscle contraction; but during tetanus, which arises from summation of many individual contractions, it becomes much clearer. Du Bois-Reymond confirmed induced contraction and identified it correctly as “secondary contraction” caused by the stimulus that the electric current of a contracting muscle in one nerve-muscle preparation gives to the nerve of a second preparation.
On July 6, 1846 Du Bois-Reymond qualified as a university lecturer with the paper “Über saure Reaktion des Muskels nach dem Tode.” He had already completed a great deal of the manuscript of Untersuchungen über thierische Elektrizität, mainly the preface of volume I (which became famous), the historical introduction, and the techniques of electrophysiology. From 1848 to 1853 he was instructor in anatomy at the Berlin Academy of Art. He did not lecture at the university until 1854, when Müller asked him to lecture on physiology with him.
Du Bois-Reymond was now concerned exclusively with physiology, and with his friends Brücke, Ludwig, and Helmholtz he became a pioneer in the new physical orientation of the field, which sought to explain all processes in an organism by means of physical, molecular, and atomic mechanisms, without drawing upon hypothetical vital forces.
He sought contact with French colleagues and visited Paris as early as 1850 in order to present the results of his experiments. He also met Claude Bernard there. However, he obviously felt that he did not receive the recognition he had expected. He reproached French researchers for reading only French publications and later leveled harsh criticism against his French neighbors, particularly during the Franco-Prussian War. He got along better with his English colleagues, traveling to England in 1852,1855, and 1866 to visit or to attend congresses. H. Bence Jones, who became a good friend and colleague, published a short version of Du Bois-Reymond’s papers in 1852.
In 1855 Du Bois-Reymond was named associate professor. When Müller died suddenly in 1858, the chair was divided. Reichert received the professorship of anatomy and Du Bois-Reymond that of physiology. Now he had to carry the entire burden of lecturing as well as a heavy schedule of academy duties.
At this time the physiology department was located in the west wing of the university building on Unter den Linden; along with the anatomy department and the museum, there were a few shabby rooms, inadequate for the needs of the physiology department. The conditions for experimentation were so unsuitable that Du Bois-Reymond had to conduct the greater part of his experiments in his own apartment. Only after long efforts was a new institute for physiology, located on the Dorotheenstrasse, completed in 1877; after Carl Ludwig’s institute in Leipzig it was the largest and most modern in Germany.
There were four departments: physiological chemistry (Eugen Baumann, Kossel), physiological histology (Gustav Fritsch), physiological physics (Arthur Christiani), and a special department for experimentation with animals (Karl Hugo Kronecker, J. Gad). Also at this time the Archiv für Anatomie, Physiologie und wissenschaftliche Medizin, which had been taken over from Müller and since then edited by Reichert and Du Bois-Reymond, was divided into an anatomical section and a physiological section, the latter being edited by Du Bois-Reymond. Most of the papers by his colleagues and pupils appeared in this journal, as did most of the publications from Ludwig’s institute in Leipzig.
Du Bois-Reymond was twice rector of the University of Berlin, in 1869-1870 and in 1882-1883. From 1876 he was one of the permanent secretaries of the Prussian Academy of Sciences, and a great part of his work was dedicated to preparing the meetings and the official speeches for the annual celebrations in memory of Leibniz, its founder, and of its great patron, Frederick II. On February 11, 1893 he celebrated the fiftieth anniversary of obtaining his doctorate. The formal address was delivered by Virchow.
On December 26, 1896 he died of senile heart disease. The eulogy given by his pupil Rosenthal was used as a preface to the second edition of Du Bois-Reymond’s speeches (1912). The best biography is by his pupil E. Boruttau but it lacks a bibliography. With Du Bois-Reymond, the last of that group died which had led German physiology to its position of uncontested leadership at the end of the nineteenth century.
From his youth Du Bois-Reymond was receptive to philosophy and religion; but in protest against his Kantian and pious father, he tended very early toward cognitive-theoretical empiricism and free-thinking atheism. He had only little love for nineteenth-century Christianity.
Politics
Du Bois-Reymond was the author of political speeches - “Der deutsche Krieg” (1870), “Das Kaiserreich und der Friede” (1871), and “Über das Nationalgefühl” (1878) - where he wrote about, not without exaggerated complaints, about the self-praise and chauvinistic feelings of superiority of the French.
Views
Many physiologists during the 19th century were attracted to "vitalism." Müller himself was a protagonist of this philosophy, which held that a vital force, present in living things, could alter physical and chemical laws. It was suggested that the organism functioned as a whole and that experimentation on its separate functions was invalid. Du Bois-Reymond rejected this indeterminate theory. He was a "materialist" and believed in the cogency of scientific analysis of the components of living processes. He was attracted to the materialistic philosophers and wrote memoirs of some of them, including Voltaire and Denis Diderot. His own philosophical views were outlined in two collections of essays, The Limits of Natural Science (1872) and Seven World Riddles (1880).
The neovitalism of Hans Driesch and Gustav von Bunge drew du Bois-Reymond’s sharp condemnation. Thus, as he wrote in 1875, he found in himself a union of “intellectual inclinations which drive me with almost equal intensity in very different directions of perceiving nature.”
He was attracted to the materialistic philosophers and wrote memoirs of some of them, including Voltaire and Denis Diderot. To him Voltaire was a fighter for intellectual freedom, human dignity, and justice, who had disseminated the significance of Newtonian thought. Du Bois-Reymond also portrayed the astonishing gifts of Diderot (1884), who was equally productive in treatises and novels, in art and science, ethics, metaphysics, philology, and philosophy. He praised the charisma of the master scientists of the past and considered the history of science the most important, but most neglected, part of cultural history.
Du Bois-Reymond’s lecture “Kulturgeschichte und Naturwissenschaft” (1876) contains a complete analysis of Western cultural history in relation to the inductive sciences. He saw the absolute organ of culture in the natural sciences and the true history of mankind in the history of the natural sciences. Man had become a “rational animal who travels with steam, writes with lightning, and paints with sunbeams.” He portrayed the weaknesses of the contemporary schools, which provide classical languages but are deficient in mathematics and the theory of conic sections.
Du Bois-Reymond was not afraid to express unpopular thoughts. His inaugural speech as rector, “Goethe und sein Ende” (1882), annoyed a great many intellectuals. He mercilessly portrayed the weaknesses of Goethe’s concept of nature, his inclination to deduction, the deficiencies of his theory of color, and even the curious contradictions in his Faust. Du Bois-Reymond maintained that natural science had come as far as it had without Goethe’s scientific writings: one should leave Goethe alone as a scientist.
Other speeches show how well read Du Bois-Reymond was and his ability to judge questions of art. The greatest excitement and the most bitter opposition were caused by the two speeches “Uber die Grenzen des Naturerkennens” (1872) and “Die sieben Weltratsel” (1880). For him there were two insoluble questions for natural science, that of the essence of matter and force and that of the occurrence of consciousness in connection with molecular processes in the brain. Even an intellect like Laplace would not be able to know all of the factors involved in these questions. The seven riddles of the world are, according to Du Bois-Reymond, those questions which science can answer only with the words ignoramus or ignorabimus: the essence of force and matter, the origin of movement, the origin of life, the teleology of nature, the origin of sense perception, the origin of thought, and free will. He considered these questions transcendental.
Metaphysics, he thought, should not be mixed with natural science: the idea of the vital force was a mistake of this kind because the law of the conservation of energy, the framework for all transformations of energy, forbids such a hypothesis.
Quotations:
“But of course, the human spirit shines brightest where the splendor of art is combined with the splendor of science.”
“Ignoramus et ignorabimus. - We do not know, and we will never know.”
“Every scientist is a descendant of Humboldt. We are all his family.”
Membership
Thanks to the great interest which Humboldt had had in galvanism since his youth, Du Bois-Reymond was elected to membership in the Royal Prussian Academy of Sciences in 1851, at the age of thirty-three. He was also a member of the Royal Society, the Saint Petersburg Academy of Sciences, the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the Lincean Academy, the Russian Academy of Sciences, the Bavarian Academy of Sciences and Humanities, and the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences.
Royal Prussian Academy of Sciences
,
Germany
1851
Royal Society
,
United Kingdom
Saint Petersburg Academy of Sciences
,
Russian Federation
Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences
,
Sweden
Hungarian Academy of Sciences
,
Hungary
American Academy of Arts and Sciences
,
United States
Lincean Academy
,
Italy
Russian Academy of Sciences
,
Russian Federation
Bavarian Academy of Sciences and Humanities
,
Germany
Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences
,
Netherlands
Personality
Du Bois-Reymond, for all his modesty, was self-confident and certain. His intellectual vitality and his many talents allowed him to make friends rapidly. He was uncommonly devoted to his friends, such as Hallmann and Ludwig, and did not allow his co-workers, such as Sachs and Fritsch, to go unrecognized. He gave his colleagues and pupils great personal freedom and latitude to develop on their own, occupying himself almost exclusively with the problems of electrophysiology. Understandably, he found it difficult in his old age to encounter much hostility and many refutations of his molecular theory of animal electricity. The opposition of his talented student Hermann was a bitter blow, but the scientific world of the nineteenth century never lacked polemics.
Du Bois-Reymond had an unusual gift for language and a finely developed sense of beauty, and he chose his words carefully. He loved figurative comparisons; those he used were sometimes audacious but never dull. His language was clear, his thought structure logical. He loved to introduce quotations from both classical and contemporary poets. French heritage blended with German thoroughness, eloquence with awareness of problems. By heritage he was particularly open to things French.
His views annoyed both extreme natural scientists, like Ernst Haeckel, and theologians. The controversy he stimulated filled the daily press as well as the scientific literature.
Connections
In 1853 Du Bois-Reymond married Jeanette Claude. They had four sons and five daughters. Of the four sons, René became a physician and a physiologist, Claude an ophthalmologist, and Allard and Felix mathematicians and engineers. Of the daughters, Estelle gained fame by editing her father’s posthumously published works.
The Pour le Mérite is an order of merit established in 1740 by King Frederick II of Prussia. The Pour le Mérite was awarded as both a military and civil honor.
The Pour le Mérite is an order of merit established in 1740 by King Frederick II of Prussia. The Pour le Mérite was awarded as both a military and civil honor.
Bavarian Maximilian Order for Science and Art,
Germany
The Bavarian Maximilian Order for Science and Art was first established on November 28, 1853 by King Maximilian II von Bayern. It is awarded to acknowledge and reward excellent and outstanding achievements in the field of science and art.
The Bavarian Maximilian Order for Science and Art was first established on November 28, 1853 by King Maximilian II von Bayern. It is awarded to acknowledge and reward excellent and outstanding achievements in the field of science and art.