Maximow, Alexander A., 1874-1928

Alexander A. Maximow was born in Russia on January 22, 1874. He earned his M.D. at the Imperial Military Academy in St. Petersburg, where he showed a keen interest in morphological problems and won special distinction for his work on the experimental production of amyloid. After two years of study in Berlin and Frieburg, he returned to St. Petersburg in 1902 as Privat-Dozent in pathology. He remained there as professor of histology and embryology from 1903 until 1922, at which point he came to the University of Chicago as aprofessor of anatomy, a position he held until his death in 1928.

In the first phase of his career, from 1896 until 1902, Maximow published both descriptive and experimental papers on normal and on abnormal histologic problems, establishing the background for his future work. His paramount interest in the later stages of his career was in the normal and pathologic histology and histogenesis of the blood and the connective tissue; pioneering and classic studies were the result of his experimental investigations into the problems of this field. By proving that all blood cells develop from a common mother cell, he confirmed the unitarian theory of hematopoiesis; among his other experimental findings were confirmatory evidence that lymphocytes of the blood, as well as of lymph nodes, are undifferentiated cells, and proof of the purely extracellular origin of argyrophile and collagenous fibers in tissue cultures.

Dr. William Bloom, of the Department of Anatomy and Physiology, worked closely with Maximow in the four years before Maximow's death. Bloom then continued the work of Maximow and brought to completion the product of the joint enterprise, the Textbook on Histology, which has appeared in seven editions since its original publication in 1930.