Martin Heinrich Rathke (1793–1860) and his pouch and cyst

Excerpt

Martin Heinrich Rathke (Fig. 1) was born in August 25, 1793, in the city of Danzig, Prussia, which is now Gdansk, Poland, and the child of George Heinrich and Catharina Elisabeth Streege. In 1814, Rathke attended the University of Göttingen to study medicine but soon moved to the University of Berlin in 1817, and in 1818 received his MD with his dissertation on the development of the ovaries in salamanders [5]. Rathke then returned to the city of Gdansk where he became a medical practitioner as well as an assistant professor of physics and physical geography. In his later work, he would meet Karl Burdach and Karl Baer who would be influential contemporaries in his continuing anatomical and embryological work. He began to work in the municipal hospital in 1825 where he became chief physician one year later in 1826. One of Rathke’s most important works came during this time as he demonstrated the appearance of gill arches in animals. This was a significant finding in the understanding of homologous structures as well as the development of human embryos [11]. In 1829, he was offered a position as professor of Physiology and General Pathology at the University of Dorpat, which is now the University of Tartu in Estonia. During this time, Rathke left medical practice to pursue a research-based profession with an emphasis on comparative anatomy and embryology. During his tenure at Dorpat from 1829 to 1835, Rathke would make discoveries in marine biology in the nearby Crimean and Black seas by naming new species as well as furthering knowledge of comparative anatomy [7]. He published work regarding many developmental processes in both vertebrates as well as aquatic animals, giving minute detail into embryological processes [6]. In 1835, Rathke received an invitation from the University of Konigsberg, now named Kaliningrad, to become a professor of anatomy and zoology.

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