Sir William Bowman, 1st Baronet

Sir William Bowman, 1st Baronet (born July 20, 1816, Nantwich, Cheshire, Eng.—died March 29, 1892, near Dorking, Surrey) was an English surgeon and histologist who discovered that urine is a by-product of the blood filtration that is carried on in the kidney. He also made important discoveries concerning the structure and function of the eye and of striated muscle.

Upon his appointment to King’s College Hospital, London (1840), he began a microscopic investigation of the fine structure and function of various organ tissues with his teacher Robert Todd. During the next two years Bowman published three major papers on the structure and function of voluntary muscle, the minute anatomy of the liver, and the structure and function of the kidneys.

Most significant were his discoveries concerning the kidneys. He found that the capsule surrounding each ball of capillaries (the glomerulus) in the nephrons (the blood filtration units of the kidney) is a continuous part of the renal duct, which eventually drains urine into the bladder. This structure, now called Bowman’s capsule, was of prime importance to his filtration theory of urine formation, which is the most important element in the present understanding of kidney function. Bowman and Todd’s investigations resulted in their The Physiological Anatomy and Physiology of Man, 2 vol. (1845–56), a pioneering work in both physiology and histology.

Turning to the study of the eye, Bowman worked at the Royal London Ophthalmic Hospital (1846–76, later Moorfields Eye Hospital) and at King’s College Hospital (1856) and taught at King’s College, London (1848–55). He was a highly successful private practitioner and was soon recognized as London’s outstanding eye surgeon and one of the world’s foremost ophthalmic research scientists. He was the first to describe several eye structures and their functions. He was created a baronet in 1884.