Unjustly forgotten scientist Wacław Mayzel (1847–1916)—co-discoverer of somatic mitosis

Descriptions of somatic cell divisions were made as early as the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries with varying degrees of accuracy. In this paper, we would like to present a forgotten Polish scientist Waclaw Mayzel (1847–1916), who described somatic mitosis in the corneal epithelium of the frog in 1875 almost simultaneously with the recognized discoveries of animal mitosis by Otto Bütschli and plant mitosis by Eduard Strasburger.