Max Johann Sigismund Schultze (25 March 1825 – 16 January 1874) was a German microscopic anatomist noted for his work on cell theory.

He founded, in 1865, and edited the important "Archiv für mikroskopische Anatomie", to which he contributed many papers, and he advanced the subject generally, by refining on its technical methods.

[2] Schultze studied medicine with the naturalist Fritz Müller, a German biologist and doctor who became a naturalized Brazilian.

It was mainly because of his friendship and correspondence with Schultze that Müller to some extent was able to follow the debate in Europe about Darwin's theory of evolution.

Schultze periodically sent him scientific literature, among which was Darwin's On the Origin of Species, and a small microscope manufactured in Berlin, by Friedrich Wilhelm Schiek (1857).