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Arthur van (or Van) Gehuchten (20 April 1861 – 9 December 1914) was a Belgian anatomist, born in Antwerp. He was professor in the faculty of medicine at the University of Leuven until the start of World War I in 1914. He moved to England and taught biology at Cambridge University until his death. Van Gehuchten is especially known for his contributions to the theory of neurons. In anatomy, the van Gehuchten method is the fixing of a histologic tissue in a mixture of glacial acetic acid 10 parts, chloroform 30 parts, and alcohol 60 parts.
Van Gehuchten adopted Waldeyer’s coinage for the nerve cell, but spelt this in French as ‘le neurone' rather than 'le neuron'. It is believed that the reason for adding the ‘e’ at the end of the word relates to the interplay between linguistics and phonetics: the final ‘n’ in ‘neuron’ would have been ‘sounded’ in the classical Greek, and also in Waldeyer’s German coinage, and, to do the same in French, there needed to be an ‘e’ placed at the end of the word. Without this, ‘neuron’ would have rhymed with ‘maison’ and the link with the original Greek would have been lost. [2]
This article needs additional citations for
verification. (November 2012) |
Arthur van (or Van) Gehuchten (20 April 1861 – 9 December 1914) was a Belgian anatomist, born in Antwerp. He was professor in the faculty of medicine at the University of Leuven until the start of World War I in 1914. He moved to England and taught biology at Cambridge University until his death. Van Gehuchten is especially known for his contributions to the theory of neurons. In anatomy, the van Gehuchten method is the fixing of a histologic tissue in a mixture of glacial acetic acid 10 parts, chloroform 30 parts, and alcohol 60 parts.
Van Gehuchten adopted Waldeyer’s coinage for the nerve cell, but spelt this in French as ‘le neurone' rather than 'le neuron'. It is believed that the reason for adding the ‘e’ at the end of the word relates to the interplay between linguistics and phonetics: the final ‘n’ in ‘neuron’ would have been ‘sounded’ in the classical Greek, and also in Waldeyer’s German coinage, and, to do the same in French, there needed to be an ‘e’ placed at the end of the word. Without this, ‘neuron’ would have rhymed with ‘maison’ and the link with the original Greek would have been lost. [2]