Medicine and Physics

Helmholtz, like Mayer, was educated for a medical career. He would have preferred
to study physics and mathematics, but the only hope for scientific training,
given his father’s meager salary as a gymnasium teacher, was a government scholarship in medicine. With the scholarship, Helmholtz studied at the Friedrich-
Wilhelm Institute in Berlin and wrote his doctoral dissertation under Johannes
Mu¨ ller. At that time, Mu¨ ller and his circle of gifted students were laying the
groundworkfor a physical and chemical approach to the study of physiology,
which was the beginning of the disciplines known today as biophysics and biochemistry.
Mu¨ ller’s goal was to rid medical science of all the metaphysical excesses
it had accumulated, and retain only those principles with sound empirical
foundations. Helmholtz joined forces with three of Mu¨ ller’s students, Emil du
Bois-Reymond, Ernst Bru¨ cke, and Carl Ludwig; the four, known later as the “1847
group,” pledged their talents and careers to the taskof reshaping physiology into
a physicochemical science.