Gustav von Bunge


Gustav Piers Alexander von Bunge was a Baltic-German physiologist known for his work in the field of vitamins.

Biography

Bunge was born on 19 January 1844 in Dorpat, Russian Empire, the son of Alexander von Bunge, a botanist, and Elisabeth Karolina von Pistohlkors. He studied chemistry and mathematics at the Imperial University of Dorpat, where he obtained a doctorate and habilitation in physiology in 1874. Bunge then studied in Strasbourg and obtained a doctorate in medicine at the University of Leipzig in 1882. At Dorpat, he had as instructors Friedrich Bidder and Carl Schmidt. In 1885, Bunge became an associate professor, and from 1886 until his death in 1920, he served as a professor of physiological chemistry at the University of Basel.
Among his more important studies were the interplay of potassium and sodium within the body; the association of sodium chloride with metabolism, and analytic studies of iron metabolism.
Bunge was the author of treatises on alcoholic spirits, of which he denounced as a "threat to health and heredity". His name is associated with "Bunge's rule", a nutritional law based on his research of human and animal milk - "that nutrients in milk are proportional to the growth of the offspring". However, Bunge rejected the entire idea of vitamins and vitamin deficiencies; he opposed the doctoral dissertation of Nikolai Lunin regarding Vitamin C and scurvy. He died on 5 November 1920 in Basel, aged 76.

Selected publications

The Alcohol Question, 1886.