Johannes Peter Müller - continued...

Müller never undertook his research trips alone, delighting in his young students’ company. Ernst Haeckel shared Müller’s fascination with animal forms and enjoyed fishing with him, but the same cannot be said for all of Müller’s pupils (Haeckel 1921, pp. 123-25). From the time that Müller arrived in Berlin, he invited gifted students to work with him, sharing his microscopes and preparations. He never had a “lab” in the modern sense of a continuous space with an adjacent office. Until the 1860s, universities in the German territories rarely assigned scientists on-site facilities to dissect specimens and perform experiments. At first, the best that Müller could offer students who wanted to begin their own investigations was two small rooms adjacent to the medical students’ dissecting hall at the Anatomical Institute, located behind the Garnisonkirche. The reports of Friedrich Bidder and Emil Du Bois-Reymond reveal how dark, cramped, and foul-smelling those workrooms were (Bidder 1934, p. 62; Du Bois-Reymond 1887, p. 193). Once the west wing of the university building was renovated in the mid-1830s, Müller began installing students with scalpels and microscopes in odd corners of the anatomical museum, where Du Bois-Reymond conducted experiments and began a makeshift Physiological Institute in the 1850s. Müller and his students also worked in their own living quarters. Jakob Henle and Theodor Schwann studied microscopic preparations at their boarding house at the corner of Mohrenstrasse and Friedrichstrasse, and Du Bois-Reymond measured the electrical activity of frogs’ nerves and muscles in his apartment near the Veterinary School (Merkel 1891, p. 138; Dierig n.d.).

In addition to teaching and performing research, Müller performed burdensome administrative duties. He served as Dean of the Medical Faculty in 1835-36 and 1842-43 and Rector of the Berlin University in 1838-39 and 1847-48. This last term proved truly unfortunate, since in March 1848 when Berlin’s citizens fought Prussian troops at the barricades, Müller became directly responsible for mediating between radical students (led by two of his brightest former pupils, Rudolf Virchow and Robert Remak) and the Prussian King. A conservative at heart, Müller felt loyal to the Prussian Cultural Ministry that had facilitated his career, and he feared that the liberals’ and radicals’ attempts to create democracy would bring poverty and social chaos. He also worried that an angry mob would loot the university building and destroy his precious anatomical museum. Du Bois-Reymond claims that Müller personally stood guard “with his sword girded” at the university gate, but his dramatic account seems over-exaggerated (Du Bois-Reymond 1887, p. 275). Twice Cultural Minister von Ladenberg summoned Müller and scolded him for failing to control the rebellious students, threatening government intervention if Müller could not make them behave (Lenz 1910, pp. 250-53). Rudolf Virchow declared that Müller was “no politician,” the worst possible man for such a sensitive job (Virchow 1858, p. 37). As soon as the semester ended, Müller suffered another paralyzing depression and was unable to resume his research until the spring of 1849.