Neuroglia: the 150 years after

One hundred and fifty years ago on 3 April 1858, at 37 years of age, Rudolf Virchow (Box 1) promulgated the concept of neuroglia in a lecture delivered at the New Pathology Institute of Berlin University. This lecture was part of a series of 20 lectures for colleagues and medical practitioners, and the 13th was entitled ‘Spinal cord and the brain’. In that lecture, Virchow made public his earlier thoughts [1] on the brain connective tissue, the ‘nervenkitt’ or nerve-cement, which he termed ‘neuroglia’; he had coined the term already in 1856 in a comment to an earlier article from 1846 when his collected works were republished.