Moritz Schiff

Unfortunately despite his independent and original spirit and being a much-cited author, he never reached the popularity of his contemporaries Emil du Bois-Reymond, Hermann von Helmholtz and Charles-Édouard Brown-Séquard.

Born into a family of Jewish merchants, Moritz Schiff can be considered as the archetype of the great nineteenth-century scientist, one of the pioneers of the experimental method in physiology as well as a polyglot, who published his articles in German, French or Italian indifferently.

[1] In Heidelberg, he had Adolf Kussmaul as one of his masters and was deeply influenced by Friedrich Tiedemann's anatomy lessons, which instilled in him a passion for biology, zoology and organic life.

[1] Back in Frankfurt, he became director of the ornithological section of the Senckenberg Museum and devoted himself to research in a small personal laboratory and in 1848 served in the revolutionary troops of Baden as a surgeon and for this reason will often be criticized for positions "too dangerous for young people".

[3] In the following years Schiff helped Charles-Lucien Bonaparte with the systematics of South American birds in his "Conspectus generum avium" and in his honor the genus sciffornis was created.

[10] Mortiz Schiff is identified, like his correspondents Jakob Moleschott and Carl Vogt, as one of the proponents of materialism and with the help of these latter two and Alexandre A. Herzen tried to found a positivist magazine, focused on anticlerical propaganda.