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The nineteenth century was the time of a real revolution in science and medicine. A lot of seminal discoveries in medicine and biology were done in this time, and many of them were coincident with the introduction of the compound microscope by Hermann van Deijl and the standard histological technique by Paul Ehrlich. The main tissue types and individual cells were characterized and originally classified more than hundred years ago, although less attention was paid to their basic functions. This was mainly due to the modality of tissue specimen processing that allowed particularly detailed descriptive studies. Even so, we can notice some attempts to correlate the structure with the function. The German scientist Paul Langerhans, well-known for the discovery of Langerhans islets of the pancreas and Langerhans cells from the epidermis, tried to change the conventional fate of morphological studies introducing in his works functional hypothesis based on traditional microscopic observations even from the beginning of his scientific career. Paul Langerhans was a complex personality of the second half of the nineteenth century, not only in medicine, but also in other fields of biology. In the present review, presented is the life and research activity of Paul Langerhans, not only because of the importance of his discoveries, but also for perspectives that were opened by these findings in unexpected fields of medicine and biology., Devetnaesto stoljeće bilo je vrijeme prave revolucije u znanosti i medicini. U tom je stoljeću došlo do mnogih otkrića u medicini i biologiji, a mnoga od njih su se podudarala s primjenom mikroskopa (Hermann van Deijl) i uvođenjem standardne histološke tehnike (Paul Ehrlich). Glavne vrste tkiva i pojedinačne stanice karakterizirane su i izvorno klasificirane prije više od stotinu godina, iako je manje pozornosti bilo posvećeno njihovim osnovnim funkcijama. To je uglavnom bilo zbog modaliteta obrade uzoraka tkiva koja je omogućavala posebno detaljne deskriptivne studije. Ipak, primjećuju se neki pokušaji povezivanja strukture s funkcijom. Njemački znanstvenik Paul Langerhans, poznat po otkriću Langerhansovih otočića gušterače i Langerhansovih stanica u epidermisu, pokušao je promijeniti konvencionalnu sudbinu morfoloških istraživanja uvodeći već od početka svoje znanstvene karijere u svoja istraživanja funkcionalnu hipotezu koja se temelji na tradicionalnim mikroskopskim promatranjima. Paul Langerhans bio je složena ličnost druge polovice XIX. stoljeća ne samo u medicini nego i u drugim područjima biologije. U ovom radu predstavljen je njegov život i njegova istraživačka djelatnost ne samo zbog važnosti njegovih otkrića već i zbog gledišta koja su ta otkrića potaknula u neočekivanim područjima medicine i biologije.