Johannes Peter Müller - continued...

When Rudolphi died in 1832, Müller made an all-out effort to obtain his Berlin professorship of anatomy and physiology, the most prestigious one in the German territories. Having enjoyed the support of the Prussian Cultural Ministry for 15 years and having always taken care to publicize his discoveries, he knew that he had a chance to win the position and wrote to Cultural Minister von Altenstein describing his qualifications for the job. Müller’s student, physiologist Emil Du Bois-Reymond, later called this a highly unusual step, but it was a fairly common practice at the time (Du Bois-Reymond 1887, pp. 184-85; Clark 1996). The Cultural Ministry first offered the job to anatomist Friedrich Tiedemann, but Müller received the position when Tiedemann turned it down. From 1833 until 1858, he worked to make Berlin a center for comparative anatomical studies, as he had promised to do in his self-nominating letter.

As a professor on Berlin’s Medical Faculty, Müller influenced a tremendous number of students. Each winter semester, he taught human and sensory anatomy and ran the medical students' dissecting laboratory with his colleague Friedrich Schlemm. Every summer semester, he taught physiology, comparative anatomy, and pathological anatomy. He also examined all Prussian candidates seeking medical degrees. Among the students impressed by his teaching were Ernst Brücke (1819-92), Emil Du Bois-Reymond (1818-96), Ernst Haeckel (1834-1919), Hermann Helmholtz (1821-94), Robert Remak (1815-65), and Rudolf Virchow (1821-1902). Helmholtz and Virchow have left detailed notes on Müller’s comparative anatomy and pathological anatomy lectures (Archiv der Berlin-Brandenburgische Anatomie der Wissenschaften, Nachlass Helmholtz 538; Nachlass Virchow 2803, 2804, 2805). Their notebooks show how Müller discussed ongoing microscopic research, offered students detailed drawings of structures, and compared the life functions of many different animals.