Moritz Traube

Moritz Traube (12 February 1826, Ratibor, Province of Silesia, Prussia (now Racibórz, Poland) – 28 June 1894, Berlin, German Empire) was a German chemist (physiological chemistry) and universal private scholar.

Traube worked on chemical, biochemical, medical, physiological, pathophysiological problems, he was engaged in hygienics, physically chemistry and chemical basic research. Although he was never a staff member of a university and earned his living as a wine merchant, he was able to refute theories of his leading contemporaries, including Justus von Liebig, Louis Pasteur, Felix Hoppe-Seyler and Julius Sachs, and to develop significant theories of his own with solid experimental foundations. The chemistry of oxygen and its significance to the organism were the central objects of his research and provided the common thread uniting almost all of his scientific activity.

Moritz Traube was a younger brother of the famous Berlin physician Ludwig Traube (physician), the co-founder of the German experimental pathology. A son, Wilhelm Traube, evolved a process of purine synthesis. Hermann Traube, another son, was a mineralogist.

Traube's father was a Jewish wine merchant, the grandson of a rabbi from Krakow. Traube graduated from the Gymnasium in the provincial town of Ratibor when he was only 16 years old. His older brother Ludwig advised him to begin scientific studies at the University of Berlin (1842-1844). He studied experimental chemistry with Eilhard Mitscherlich, chemistry and stoichiometry with Heinrich Rose, mineralogy with Christian Samuel Weiss, physics with Heinrich Wilhelm Dove; and practised experimental chemistry in the laboratory of Karl Friedrich August Rammelsberg. He moved to Giessen to participate in Liebig's practical-analytical course in 1844/45. He attended lectures in botany (Hermann Hoffmann) and logic (Moritz Carrière). In 1845 he returned to Berlin (geology with Heinrich Girard). In 1847 he received his doctorate with a thesis entitled "De nonnullis chromii connubiis". The later well-known botanist Nathanael Pringsheim supported him. For a while Traube worked in a Berlin dyeworks (1848/49), then continued his studies: anatomy with Friedrich Schlemm, physiology and comparative anatomy with Johannes Müller, pathology with Rudolf Virchow and pharmacology with Eilhard Mitscherlich. For a few weeks he attended lectures in clinical disciplines such as surgery (with Bernhard von Langenbeck) and auscultation and percussion (Ludwig Traube). The extraordinarily wide spectrum of his qualifications was a basis of his universal research.

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