The Grand Duchy of Hesse was the birthplace of two major scientific materialists, both of whom pursued their studies in science at Giessen. Karl Vogt and Ludwig Büchner were not, however, students there together. In fact Büchner was just completing his medical education in 1847 when Vogt was called to Giessen from Switzerland as a professor of zoology. Vogt was the first and in many ways the most independent of the scientific materialists. He began writing just prior to the Revolution of 1848, and his radical position at Frankfurt was already the culmination of an eventful and an unusual career. Consequently he cannot be seen solely as a product of the reactionary years following 1848, though some of his contemporaries accounted for the rise of scientific materialism in this way.