Evening Republican, Volume 15, Number 181, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 2 August 1911 — Unpaid Genius of Theodor Schwann [ARTICLE]

Unpaid Genius of Theodor Schwann

BY M. A. LANE, SC. B.,

(Former Research Fellow in Physiology, University of Illinois.)

One day in a great German university a teacher of physiology was demonstrating to a small class of medical students certain peculiar facts about the contraction of muscle. To do this the teacher was in need of a little instrument, Bimple, and yet not easy to make "by hand." The instructor, however, was busy In an effort to put the tiling together with bits of wood and wire.

Among the students who were watching him was an undersized young fellow of $1 who, after noting several failures on the part of the instructor, ventured a criticism.

“Doctor," he said, “we have three or four fine instruments of that kind in the case. They are perfect. Why not use one of them?”

Now the instructor knew well enough of the existence of the factory-made Instruments in the laboratory, but he was Improvising the thing in order to teach his men self-reliance and the use of their brain and hands. He glanced somewhat contemptuously at the \Joung student and replied: '1 want to show I am able to do what any other man has done. Don’t you?"

"No," answered the young man. “I walk to do what no other man has keen able to do before me." 'Hiis young man was Theodor Schwann, afterwards discoverer of the most startling fact known to modern science—the fact that the human body consists of an inconceivably vast number of microscopic animals called cells, •11 working harmoniously together for the common good of all. We cannot see these little animals that form our bodies because Of their exceedingly minute size. It Is as it we were looking at the Sahara desert from • balloon three or four miles above the •ttrface of the earth, whence It umuld be Impossible to distinguish the separate grains of sand. BaCors Sebwann made his wonderful discovery It was known that the bodies •* Plant* wars composed of pells, and

one day it “just flashed” upon Schwann that the animal body might be built upon a similar plan. Investigation proved that he was right, and the great “cell theory” was announced —not so much a theory as a fact, and one of the simplest and most natural facts in the world when understood even superficially, the only way in which science, after the lapse of 75 years, has been able to master its causes.

Schwann was a poor boy who worked his way through school with little help from his father. He became the pupil of the “father of modern physiology," Johannes Mueller, and for seven years —the very years during which he made every one of his great discoveries —he was employed as caretaker of the museum at the University of Berlin. At 28, when he published the anouncement of his cell theory, he still held the same job, and was earning the same pay he had received from the beginning—s 7 per month! In those years—at the magnificent salary of ah office boy—often in want of a square meal, never with a decent suit of clothes to his back, Theodor Schwann dug from the rich soil of nature certain grand nuggets of knowledge, of which everybody has heard, while the name of the digger Is scarcely known popularly, even to the vast majority of medical doctors. It was Schwann who discovered the gastric ferment pepsin, and gave It its name. Sebwann was the first to show that life could not come into being except ,Uj rough the agency of pre-exist-ing living bodies. To Schwann’s original work the famed Pasteur owes all his immortality; and were it not for Schwann’s discovery of the minute structure of the animal body there had been no modem medicine. The poor German boy become the most honored man In Europe. Kings gave him decorations, every learned society placed him on its roll of members, and at 29 he was nominated professor of anatomy at the University of Louvain, and later at Liege*, where he

remained until his death. In that capacity he was paid probably about $35 or S4O a week. After considerable search I have not been able to find any printed record that he ever married. You could hardly blame the poor man —on that pay. The prosperous American business man will probably say that Schwann was a fool to waste his time in a profession that paid him so poorly. It is certainly a fact that nobody thought his work worth paying for; and it is a serious question whether work that nobody wants, to pay for is really worth doing at all. There are no Schwanns in thiß country. Had Schwann lived here he would have gone into the doctor business and built up for himself a big practice. Schwann’s bust in marble illuminates the university in which he was so long a teacher. But the bank discount on a marble bust —when a man is dead—is hardly a reward for the best efforts of genius.

Will the time ever come when governments will take care that men who do fine and useful things for glory alone will get gold as well as glory Into the bargain? (Copyright. 19U. by the Columbia Press Syndicate.)