Neither Schwann nor Schleiden had found something new or unveiled an undiscovered property of the cell. It wasn’t novelty that brought them fame; it was the sheer brazenness of their claim. They collated the work of their predecessors—Hooke, Leeuwenhoek, Raspail, Bichat, and a Dutch physician-scientist named Jan Swammerdam—and synthesized it into a radical proposition.
