The Mast Cell

Abstract

The controversial, and for long elusive, story of MCs begins on a remote day in the summer 1878, precisely on the 17th June of that year, when a 24-year-old medical student, the future Nobel Prize laureate Paul Ehrlich, discussed his doctoral thesis at the Medical Faculty of Leipzig University (Fig. 2.1). The title of his dissertation was: “Beiträge zur Theorie und Praxis der histologischen Färbung” (“Contribution to the theory and practice of histological dyes”) (Ehrlich 1878). In his presentation, dedicated to the chemical basis of the basic aniline dyes, the young Ehrlich devoted a chapter to the tissue staining properties of the aniline compounds and described for the first time a class of aniline-positive cells of the connective tissues endowed with cytoplasmic metachromatic granules (“granulierte Bindgewebezellen”) for which the name “Mastzellen” was proposed (Ehrlich 1878). This name, which means “well-fed cells”, was attached to the newly described cell population in the belief that their aniline-positive metachromatic granules might contain deposits of nutrients and might develop as a result of hypernutrition.