He was a student at several universities, being influenced by Ignaz Dollinger (1770–1841) in Munich, Friedrich Arnold (1803–1890) in Freiburg, Jakob Henle (1809–1895) in Heidelberg and Carl von Rokitansky (1804–1878) in Vienna.
However, Franz Christian Boll (1849–1879) is credited as the discoverer of rhodopsin because he was able to describe its "visual pigment cycle".
Alongside Carl Bergmann, Müller is credited as co-discover, in 1854, of the anatomical site where vision is initiated .
[4][5] In 1856, with his colleague Albert von Kölliker (1817–1905), Müller showed that an electric current was produced from each contraction of a frog's heart.
After his death, a large number of his works were published by Otto Becker (1828–1890) in a collection titled Heinrich Müller's gesammelte und hinterlassene Schriften zur Anatomie und Physiologie des Auges (Heinrich Müller's collected and bequeathed writings on the anatomy and physiology of the eye).