Helmholtz and the shaping of the American physics elite in the Gilded Age

FROM THE EARLY 1850s until his death in 1894. Hermann von Helmholtz was one of Germany's foremost men of science. As much if not more so than several other leading German natural scientists-one thinks, for example, of such figures as the polymath Alexander von Humboldt, the chemist Justus von Liebig; the pathologist, anthropologist, and politician Rudolf Virchow: the physiologist and polemicist Emil du Bois-Reymond; the immunologist Robert Koch: and the evolutionary theorist and science popularizer Ernst Haeckel-Helmholtz's prestigious name symbolized. the ideals and accomplishments of German Wissenschaft. For many throughout Europe and America during the second half of the 19th century, he exemplified German science.