spacer
/ 10

Johannes Peter Müller - continued...

Müller underwent a final depressive bout, from which he never fully recovered, after a traumatic shipwreck in September, 1855. While returning from a research trip to Sweden, he was hurled into the Baltic Sea when his steamship sank, and he survived only by clinging to a piece of wreckage (Haberling 1924, pp. 426-29). A young student who had accompanied him drowned, and he felt personally responsible for the pupil’s death. Although Müller continued his teaching and research after this incident, his health began to fail. He took opium to alleviate abdominal pains and combat the insomnia that had plagued him for most of his life. Since his students’ accounts of his untimely death on April 28, 1858 vary so greatly, it is impossible to be sure of its cause. Du Bois-Reymond claims that Müller died unexpectedly of “the rupture of a great vessel”; Virchow, that he felt his death coming on and prepared for it by summoning his son (Du Bois-Reymond 1887, p. 298; Virchow 1858, p. 38). Ernst Haeckel, however, speculated that Müller took his own life, pointing out how depressed his teacher had become (Haberling 1924, pp. 450-51).

Müller’s depression in the 1850s resulted from his waning confidence in pelagic fishery and his accumulation and ordering of animal forms. Müller never believed that species had evolved over time, and he died before the publication of Charles Darwin’s Origin of Species (1859), which suggested a “great plan of life” according to which he might have organized his museum. His students’ accounts of his personality and scientific style vary so greatly because they serve the pupils’ own interests, constructing Müller as a precursor who raised questions but failed to answer them because he lacked the insights that they developed through their own work (Jardine 1997, p. 302). Du Bois-Reymond wrote that Müller’s vitalism and quest for a grand plan prevented any real commitment to rigorous physiological research, such as his own studies of animal electricity (Du Bois-Reymond 1887, p. 222). Ernst Brücke and Hermann Helmholtz largely shared this view. Ernst Haeckel claimed that Müller would have embraced evolutionary theory, which would have allowed him to solve the “riddle” of life’s varying forms—something that Haeckel believed he had accomplished in his best-selling work, The Riddle of the Universe (1901).

Müller’s scientific value is best assessed through the extraordinarily diverse work of these critical students, achievements in anatomy, histology, pathology, embryology, neurophysiology, and physics. As a teacher, he espoused the romantic notion of life-force but encouraged students to investigate any interesting structure or phenomenon. While he never discovered the “great plan of life,” he inspired a generation of researchers to explore life’s wonders.

Reference: Otis, Laura. 2004. Johannes Müller. The Virtual Laboratory (ISSN 1866-4784), https://vlp.mpiwg-berlin.mpg.de/references?id=enc22&page=p0009