The Late Professor Hoppe-Seyler1

ERNEST FELIX IMMANUEL HOPPE 2 was born in Freiburg on the Umstrut (Saxony) on December 26, 1825. At the age of nine he lost his mother, and at eleven, being left an orphan by the death of his father, he was taken charge of and educated by the governing body of an endowed institution in Halle. After the completion of his school course he commenced in 1846 the study of the natural sciences as a student of the University of Halle. Migrating early in his student's career to Leipzig, he had the good fortune to lay the foundations of his knowledge of anatomy and physiology under the three distinguished brothers Weber (Ernst Heinrich, Wilhelm and Eduard), to study chemistry under Erdmann, and under the eminent physiological chemist Karl Gotthold Lehmann, medicine under Oppolzer, surgery under Günther, and pathological anatomy under Bock. Hoppe spent the last two semesters of his student's course in Berlin, following the courses of Romberg, Langenbeck and Casper. He took the degree of Doctor of Medicine in 1850, presenting a dissertation “De cartilaginum structura et chondrino nonnulla,” which he dedicated to his former master E. H. Weber, and which indicated the impulse he had received towards anatomical as well as chemical investigation, on the one hand through the influence of the Webers, on the other through that of K. G. Lehmann.