Obituary Notices. 
1235 
Wilhelm His, K. S. Geheimer Rath, Professor of Anatomy, 
Leipzig, Honorary Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh, 
1900-1904. By Professor D. J. Cunningham. 
(Read July 4, 1904.) 
Amongst the many remarkable men of science of a remarkable 
century Professor Wilhelm His will always be given a prominent 
and honoured place. In almost every branch of anatomy he ha's 
left his mark, and during the last thirty years no one has done so 
much to advance our knowledge of that subject. 
Although a professor in Leipzig, where the best part of his work 
was accomplished, Germany was merely the country of his adoption. 
Pie belonged to an old Swiss family, and was born in Basel in 1831. 
It was there that His received his early education, and it was in 
the University of that town that he commenced, at the age of 
eighteen, the study of medicine. His career as a student was 
marked by a restless desire to profit by the tuition of the great 
teachers of that time, no matter where they were to be found. 
Thus in his second year of study we find him at Berne, where he 
came under the influence of Theile the anatomist and of Valentin 
the physiologist. In the following year (1850) he went to Berlin, 
where he had the singular good fortune to have as his teachers 
Johannes Muller and Robert Remak. There can be no doubt that 
this formed a crucial point in his career. He was profoundly im- 
pressed by the manner and method of the teaching of the great 
comparative anatomist Muller, and it is believed that a lecture 
which he heard Remak deliver upon the development of glands 
first stimulated in him that curiosity in regard to development in 
general which in his after life led to such magnificent results. 
But his peripatetic pursuit of knowledge did not end in Berlin. 
In 1852 he went to Wiirtzburg. At that time Virchow was a 
young professor in this school, and His worked in his laboratory 
and conducted an investigation the results of which were sub- 
sequently published. Having completed his studies, he graduated 
