Many medical students and doctors are familiar with the name Paul Ehrlich (1834-1915), but not all of them know much about him. He was a physician and a scientist and is best known for his development of staining techniques and his interest and contribution to Immunology. He was invited to join Robert Koch’s Berlin Institute of Infectious Diseases.
He was very intelligent and dedicated and was influenced by Rudolph Virchow (1821-1902). According to Max Wintrobe Virchow’s thesis; ‘A Life filled with Toil and Work is not a Burden but a Blessing’ was a mantra for Ehrlich. During his lifetime, German medical education encouraged medical students to ‘find their own way’. This climate, no doubt, influenced Abraham Flexner’s seminal report (1910) on medical education in America and the importance of research in undergraduate teaching.
Image credit: Paul Ehrlich, 1915. Photograph by Harris & Ewing. Courtesy of the Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division. Public domain.
The most well-known story about Ehrlich told by his secretary Martha Marquardt, is the one about staining slides: ‘His laboratory was notorious for its apparent chaos so that there was hardly an empty chair on which to sit.’ A servant lit a small stove on which Ehrlich had put some slides to dry. To Ehrlich’s amazement the slides, which contained sputum from a patient with tuberculosis, he found bacilli stained with the acidic dye’. So, the stage was set for an explosion, which was to change the face of medicine forever.
Ehrlich was awarded the Nobel Prize and made many other contributions to medicine. So, a curious mind can turn a serendipitous event into one of major importance.
His interests were not confined to medicine, and did you know he even dug with Heinrich Schliemann (1822-1890), the famous but somewhat controversial archaeologist, during the excavation of the ancient city of Troy, showing that someone can have two major interests at the same time.
Further Reading
Maxwell M. Wintrobe. Blood, Pure and Eloquent. McGraw-Hill, 1980. ISBN 0-07-071135-6.