Paul Langerhans

Paul Langerhans ( born July 25, 1847 in Berlin, † July 20, 1888 in Funchal, Madeira ) was a German pathologist. According to him, the islets of Langerhans of the pancreas and Langerhans cells of the skin are named.

Life

Langerhans came from a well-known scientist - family. His father Paul Langerhans senior was a doctor; his younger brothers were also doctors. One of them, Robert Langerhans, was assistant to Rudolf Virchow and later even pathology professor. His grandfather was Friedrich Wilhelm Langerhans, the first Berlin city planner.

After visiting the school to the Grey Monastery in Berlin, he wrote in 1865 a of medicine at the University of Jena. During this time, Ernst Haeckel and Carl Gegenbaur influenced him greatly. In 1866 he moved to Berlin and worked in the Pathological Institute of the friend of the family Virchow. In Virchow and Heinrich Adolf von Bardeleben he was in 1869 "On the finer structure of the pancreas" doctorate. He discovered in the pancreas located island-like " cell clusters ", in 1893 after him " Ilots de Langerhans " ( " islets of Langerhans " ) called the French histopathologist Laguesse Edouard ( 1861-1927 ). Already in 1867 he had discovered as a student with a technique of gold chloride staining of Julius Cohnheim later named after him Langerhans cell, a form of dendrites. However, he wrongly assumed that it was a nerve cell of the skin in these epidermal lymphocytes form.

1870 undertook Langerhans together with Heinrich Kiepert an expedition to Egypt, Syria and Palestine to conduct studies on leprosy sufferers. During the Franco-German War he worked for the Germans in a military hospital. In 1871 he took a job as a pathological prosector at the University of Freiburg im Breisgau, and habilitated there in the same year with a thesis on the anatomy of sympathetic ganglion cells. 1874 appointed extraordinary professor, forced him an erupting in the fall of tuberculosis to end his academic career. After Stays in Italy, Germany and Switzerland, brought no improvement, he settled in 1875 in Funchal on the Portuguese island of Madeira, where he remained until his death. The mild climate initially led to an improvement in his health, so that he could work as a doctor again and in 1879 opened a medical practice in Funchal. So he treated Ebart Alfred (1848-1883), whose widow Margaret (1852-1933) he married after his death.

During his time in Madeira Langerhans began to be interested in the marine animals and plants of the Portuguese coast. Among other things, he examined a new worm species from the class of polychaetes, which he called his friend Virchow in honor Virchowia. He has also written a manual for 1885 Madeira, in which he reported, inter alia, the climate of the archipelago and associated cures for tuberculosis.

During the progress of tuberculosis, Langerhans ill in February 1887 to nephritis, in consequence of which he died at the age of 40 years. He was buried in Funchal on the English cemetery, the " Cemitério Británico ", where his well-kept by the German Society of Dermatology grave can still be visited today. The German Diabetes Society award in his honor since 1978, the Langerhans badge for achievements in diabetes research.