BiocHEMiCAL Bulletin 



Volume III APRIL and JULY, 1914 Nos. 11 and 12 



PROFESSOR HUGO KRONECKER 



Hugo Kronecker, for the last thirty years professor of physiol- 

 ogy at the University of Berne, Switzerland, died June 6. Al- 

 though 75 years old, death surprised him in the midst of scientific 

 activity. He attended the last meeting of the German Congress of 

 Physiologists at Berlin where, on June 5th, he demonstrated experi- 

 ments which should support the neurogenic theory of the origin of 

 the heart beat. On his way home he stopped at Nauheim, to inspect 

 an apparatus which he installed there for the study of and use in 

 cardiac diseases. His death came there, suddenly, like a flash — per- 

 haps by means of the cardiac center which he discovered thirty 

 years before. 



Kronecker was one of the last of a classical period in German 

 physiology. He was pupil, assistant and intimate friend of the 

 master minds of that period : Helmholtz, du Bois-Reymond and Carl 

 Ludwig. At the same time, he was master and friend of many 

 leading physiologists of a later generation and of many countries ; he 

 was an international leader in his science. 



He was born in Liegnitz, Prussia, f rom a well-to-do family with 

 scientific proclivities. The celebrated mathematician Leopold Kron- 

 ecker was his older brother. After finishing his general education 

 at the Gymnasium in Liegnitz he studied medicine in Berlin, Heidel- 

 berg and Pisa (Italy). In Heidelberg he came under the special in- 

 fluence of Helmholtz, who introduced Kronecker into the science 

 of physiology. The problem of muscular fatigue, which Kronecker 

 studied first under Helmholtz and which he treated in his thesis, 

 became the source of many important investigations, which he car- 

 ried out at various times during his scientific career. 



In 1865 he became assistant to Traube. This celebrated clini- 



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