Eilhard Mitscherlich - Early Life and Work

Early Life and Work

Mitscherlich was born at Neuende (now a part of Wilhelmshaven) in the Lordship of Jever, where his father was pastor. His uncle, Christoph Wilhelm Mitscherlich (1760–1854), professor at Göttingen, was in his day a celebrated scholar. He was educated at Jever under the historian Friedrich Christoph Schlosser, when he went to Heidelberg in 1811, and devoted himself to philology, giving special attention to the Persian language. In 1813 he went to Paris to obtain permission to join the embassy which Napoleon I of France was sending to Persia.

The events of 1814 put an end to this, and Mitscherlich resolved to study medicine in order that he might enjoy that freedom of travel usually allowed in the East to physicians. He began at Göttingen with the study of chemistry, and this so arrested his attention that he gave up the journey to Persia. From his Göttingen days dates the treatise on certain parts of Eurasian history, compiled from manuscripts in the university library and published in Persian and Latin in 1814, under the title Mirchondi historia Thaheridarum historicis nostris hucusque incognitorum Persiae principum.

In 1818 Mitscherlich went to Berlin and worked in the laboratory of Heinrich Friedrich Link (1767–1851). There he made analyses of phosphates and phosphites, arsenates and arsenites, confirming the conclusions of Jöns Jakob Berzelius as to their composition; and his observation that corresponding phosphates and arsenates crystallize in the same form was the germ from which grew the theory of isomorphism, which he communicated to the Berlin Academy in December 1819. In that year Berzelius suggested Mitscherlich to the Prussian education minister Karl vom Stein zum Altenstein as successor to Martin Heinrich Klaproth at Berlin. Altenstein did not immediately carry out this proposal, but he obtained for Mitscherlich a government grant to enable him to continue his studies in Berzelius' laboratory at the Karolinska Institutet in Stockholm. Mitscherlich returned to Berlin in 1821, and in the summer of 1822 he delivered his first lecture as extraordinary professor of chemistry in the university, where in 1825 he was appointed ordinary professor. In 1823, he was elected a foreign member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences.