Victor Hensen
German zoologist (1835-1924)
Christian Andreas Victor Hensen (10 February 1835 – 5 April 1924) was a German zoologist and marine biologist (planktology). He coined the term plankton and laid the foundation for biological oceanography and quantitative studies.
Family
Hensen was born in the town of Schleswig where his father ran a school for the deaf and dumb. His mother Henriette Caroline Amalie was the daughter of physician Carl Ferdinand Suadicani who founded an asylum in Schleswig. Hensen had eight sisters and five brothers including from his father's first marriage.
Education and work
Hensen went to school in Schleswig from 1845 to 1859 and then joined a grammar school in Glückstadt (Holstein) after which he joined to study medicine at the universities of Würzburg, Berlin (studying under Müller) and Kiel. In 1859, he received his doctorate in Kiel for a thesis on epilepsy and urinary secretions. He worked for a while at Kiel and in 1859 he became a lecturer in anatomy and histology. He became an associate professor in 1864, succeeding Peter Ludwig Panum.
In 1867, he became a member of the Prussian House of Representatives to push towards studies of the ocean.
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This entry incorporates text from “Victor Hensen” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.