Magnus Gustav Retzius. Photograph by Elliott & Fry. Iconographic Collections Keywords: portrait photographs.
School period
College/University
Gallery of Magnus Retzius
Uppsala University, Uppsala, Sweden
After attending the Gymnasium in Stockholm, Retzius began to study medicine at age eighteen, first in Uppsala University.
Gallery of Magnus Retzius
Karolinska Institutet, Solna, Stockholm County, Sweden
After Retzius transferred to the Karolinska Institutet, he became medicine licentiat in 1869.
Gallery of Magnus Retzius
University of Lund, Lund, Scania, Sweden
Retzius received his doctorate from the University of Lund in 1871.
Career
Gallery of Magnus Retzius
1907
Gustaf Retzius. Painting by Emil Österman at the Swedish Medical Association.
Gallery of Magnus Retzius
Professor Magnus Gustaf (or Gustav) Retzius (17 October 1842 – 21 July 1919) was a Swedish physician and anatomist.
Gallery of Magnus Retzius
Anthropologist Gustaf Retzius is in the process of measuring the head of the Harjedal sam Fjellstedt, within the framework of the race biological research. Retzius on the left in the picture is dressed in a suit and holds a slider in one hand as he reads a book. In front of him is Fjellstedt wearing traditional Sami costume.
Gallery of Magnus Retzius
Magnus Gustav Retzius, Swedish anatomist and ethnologist.
Achievements
Membership
Awards
Prix Montyon
For his research, Retzius was awarded the Prix Montyon by the French Académic des Sciences.
Anthropologist Gustaf Retzius is in the process of measuring the head of the Harjedal sam Fjellstedt, within the framework of the race biological research. Retzius on the left in the picture is dressed in a suit and holds a slider in one hand as he reads a book. In front of him is Fjellstedt wearing traditional Sami costume.
Magnus Gustaf Retzius was a prominent Swedish anatomist, anthropologist, and histologist. He is acknowledged for dedicating a large part of his life to researching the histology of the sense organs and nervous system.
Background
Magnus Gustaf Retzius was born on October 17, 1842, in Stockholm. His grandfather, Anders Johan Retzius, was a professor of natural history at the University of Lund and did distinguished work in chemistry, botany, zoology, mineralogy, and paleontology. His father, Anders Adolf Retzius, professor of anatomy at the Karolinska Institutet, achieved fame as an anatomist and anthropologist. His father’s older brother, Magnus Christian Retzius, was a hygienist and professor of obstetrics at the Karolinska Institutet. Anders Retzius remarried in 1835; his second wife, the mother of Gustav Retzius, was Emilia Sofia Wahlberg, sister of the botanist and entomologist Peter Frederik Wahlberg.
Education
After attending the Gymnasium in Stockholm, Retzius enrolled at Uppsala University in 1860 and received his medicine kandidat degree there in 1866. He transferred to the Karolinska Institutet where he became medicine licentiat in 1869 and completed his doctorate in medicine in 1871 at the University of Lund.
In 1871 Retzius became a Dozent in anatomy at the Karolinska Institutet. In 1862, 1869, and 1872–1873, he traveled in England, Germany, Switzerland, Italy, Belgium, France, Finland, and Russia to increase his knowledge. In 1877 a personal extraordinary professorship of histology was created for Retzius at the Karolinska Institutet. He was promoted to full professor of anatomy in 1889, but he resigned in 1890 to devote himself full time to pure research.
After marrying Anna Wilhelmina Hierta, who was the daughter of the founder of the Stockholm Aftonblade, the marriage not only brought Retzius the financial independence he sought for his scientific endeavors, it also provided him with an opportunity to demonstrate his wide-ranging interests in literature as temporary editor of the Aftonbladet. His literary efforts included travel descriptions, prize-winning collections of poems, and translations of the poems of Robert Burns into Swedish (1872).
The number and scope of Retzius’ scientific publications were unique in his time. He presented the results of his research in more than 300 papers devoted to descriptive macroscopic and microscopic anatomy, comparative anatomy, embryology, anthropology, zoology, botany, and pathological anatomy. Retzius was very concerned with the presentation of his illustrations. Although the format he selected for his publications - large folio volumes - was very costly, it allowed him to furnish a synoptic view of his carefully executed drawings by means of unfolded plates. Most of his papers were in the new series of Biologische Untersuchungen (1890–1914). “These investigations constituted a kind of personal journal in which the editor was alone responsible for the costs, was the sole contributor, and usually the draftsman as well. Within its field this publication was unique. As soon as Retzius had brought out one volume he began work on a new one.
Besides works that were accessible to only a few (predominantly foreign) specialists, Retzius coauthored a series of popular scientific works under the general title Ur car this forskning (from 1872). His collaborator was his friend Axel Key (1832–1901), a pathologist. The series filled the public’s need for reliable information about science.
Retzius’ did work on the nervous system (central nervous system and its membranes, nerve cells and nerve fibers, sense organs - receptors of the external skin, odor, and taste receptors, the eye and ear); cells and cell division; bones, cartilage, connective tissue, and muscle tissue: the liver and the spleen; the ovum and its coverings; spermatozoa; embryology; anthropology and ethnography; methods in anatomical research; and on such miscellaneous topics as history of science, Swedenborg as anatomist and physiologist of the brain (1903), Linnaeus (1907), and an edition of the letters of Johannes Müller to Anders Retzius.
The bulk of Retzius, writings were devoted to neuroanatomy and neurophysiology. Their direct influence on contemporary work can be seen from the wealth of citations to them in, for example, the publications of Louis Ranvier. The development of experimental neurophysiology owed much to Retzius’ study of microscopic structure, particularly of the conducting elements of the nerves and their sheaths (1876) but also of the sensory nerve endings. Given the limitations of the light microscope, Retzius advanced this study as far as was possible at the time.
Even as late as 1950, when R. Lorentc De Nó provoked a debate on the ineffectiveness of the nerve sheaths as diffusion barriers, most researchers found it necessary to refer to the still-authoritative investigations of Key and Retzius. Retzius’ application of Golgi’s silver nitrate method and, especially, of Paul Ehrlich’s methylene blue dyeing method for nerve structures led to further differentiation of the cellular elements and of the sensitive nerve endings in various classes of animals. On the basis of his own research, Retzius became one of the early proponents of the neuron theory.
Further contributions that Retzius made to the knowledge of the central nervous system include the description of the eminentia saccularis on the tuber cinereum, of the corpus amygdaloideum, amygdaloid nucleus, and of previously unnoticed convolutions in the rhinencephalon (in honor of his father he named these Retzius’ gyri ).
Among Retzius’ papers in anatomy and embryology, the most important were devoted to the process of bone formation (including the demonstration of the mitotic division of the cartilage cells) and to comparative studies. In the latter, he dealt with the ape brain, the brains of many other types of animals, the comparative anatomy of the ear labyrinth, the development of the form of the human body during the fetal period, and the structure of spermatozoa (the many forms of which he documented in masterful illustrations).
Retzius’ work in anthropology included observations of the Lapps of northern Finland; descriptions of ancient Swedish, Finnish, and Indian skulls; and anthropometric measurements of Swedish conscripts.
He attempted to establish a correlation between brain structure and talent. As part of his effort to do this he described the brains of five people endowed with exceptional intellectual gifts: an unnamed statesman, the astronomer Hugo Gylden (1841–1896), the physicist Siljeström (1815–1892), the physiologist Otto Loven (1835–1904), and the mathematician Sonya Kovalevsky (1850–1891).
Finally, he investigated 100 brains to determine if those of men and women differ in macroscopic structure. Among the women’s brains, he found fewer deviations from the principal type; on the other hand, no arrangement of the furrows and convolutions was found to be more characteristic of one sex than of the other. At the request of his wife, Retzils’ own brain was examined at the Karolinska Institutet.
Retzius' anatomical and histological work concerned, in particular, the sense organs of vertebrates and invertebrates. In humans, he studied the anatomy of the brain and the nervous system. His book Das Menschenhirn (The Human Brain) was perhaps the most important work on the anatomy of the brain written in the nineteenth century. He also gave important contributions to the anatomical description of the muscles of the eardrum, the bones of the middle ear and the eustachian tube, and he conducted research on the human reproductive cells and the development of the fetus.
Retzius wrote in German “because at present the science of anatomy is studied most intensively in Germany, and as a result the terminology is most developed in this language,” and “because in order to be of use, such specialized scientific studies must seek to reach a broader audience than works written in Swedish would find.”
Membership
In 1901 Gustaf Retzius became a member of the Swedish Academy. He was also a member of the Royal Society, of the Bavarian Academy of Sciences and Humanities, of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences.
Connections
In 1876 Retzius married Anna Wilhelmina Hierta (1841–1924), daughter of the founder of the Stockholm Aftonbladet. She was an exceptionally active woman who, among other things, promoted medical education for women.