1839 births

Frederik Hendrik Kaemmerer (23 October 1839 – 4 April 1902) was a Dutch painter. He originally worked in the Romantic and Academic styles, but later became an Impressionist.

Marie-Clément Rodier, C.S.Sp. (French pronunciation: [maʁiklemɑ̃ ʁɔdje]; born Vital Rodier; 1839–1904) was a French missionary brother in Algeria. He is credited with creating the clementine variety of mandarin orange in 1902.
Rodier was born 25 May 1839 as Vital Rodier in Malvieille, near to Chambon-sur-Dolore, France. Originally a member of the Brothers of the Annunciation at Misserghin in Algeria, he helped to run an orphanage. Brother Marie-Clément worked with the orphanage's citrus trees, and made grafts from an uncultivated tree that had grown among some thorn bushes in the orchard. This graft resulted in the clementine, which was named in honor of its creator.Brother Marie-Clément's new variety was "a species of mandarin, which won the admiration of connoisseurs and which the orphans christened the Clementine. It was neither a mandarin tree nor an orange tree. Its fruit was redder than a mandarin and had a delicious taste and, moreover, it had no pith".Brother Marie-Clément became a brother in the Congregation of the Holy Spirit after the Brothers of the Annunciation were authorized to join that order in 1903. He died in 1904.
In 2010, a building on the campus of Duquesne University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania was named Clement Hall in honor of Brother Marie-Clément.

Paule Mink (born Adèle Paulina Mekarska; November 9, 1839 – April 18, 1901) was a French feminist and socialist revolutionary of Polish descent. She participated in the Paris Commune and in the First International. Her pseudonym is also sometimes spelled Minck.

Luigi Capuana (May 28, 1839 – November 29, 1915) was an Italian author and journalist and one of the most important members of the verist movement (see also verismo (literature)). He was a contemporary of Giovanni Verga, both having been born in the province of Catania within a year of each other. He was also one of the first Italian authors influenced by the works of Émile Zola, French author and creator of naturalism. Capuana also wrote poetry in Sicilian, of which an example appears below.
He was the author of plays (Garibaldi, Vanitas Vanitatum, Parodie, Semiritmi), stories (Studi sulla letteratura contemporanea, Per l'arte, Gli "ismi" contemporanei, Cronache letterarie, Il teatro italiano contemporaneo), novels (Giacinta, Marchese di Roccaverdina, La sfinge, Giovanna Guglicucci: o le pareti del labirinto, Profumo, Rassegnazione) and various other theatrical works.

Pierre Henri Dorie (1839–1866) was a French missionary of the Paris Foreign Missions Society, who was martyred in Korea in 1866. His feast day is 7 March, and he is also venerated along with the rest of the 103 Korean Martyrs on 20 September.

William Erasmus Darwin (27 December 1839 – 8 September 1914) was the first-born son, and the eldest of all the children of Charles and Emma Darwin, and the subject of psychological studies by his father. He was educated at Rugby School and Christ's College, Cambridge, and later became a banker at Grant and Maddison's Union Banking Company in Southampton. In 1877 he married an American, Sara Price Ashburner Sedgwick (1839 – 1902), daughter of Theodore Sedgwick. William was a great believer in university education being available to all, and championed the establishment of a university college in Southampton in 1902. The Darwins had no children of their own, and after his wife died, William devoted himself much to his nieces Gwen Raverat, Frances Cornford, and Margaret Keynes. William died on 8 September 1914 at Sedbergh in Cumbria. Raverat remembered him fondly as an eccentric and entirely unselfconscious man in her childhood memoirs Period Piece (1952).

There is a story about him at my grandfather's funeral at Westminster Abbey. He was sitting in the front seat as eldest son and chief mourner, and he felt a draught on his already bald head; so he put his black gloves to balance on the top of his skull, and sat like that all through the service with the eyes of the nation upon him.
William is primarily notable as a subject of Charles Darwin's studies of infant psychology. Darwin was very fond of his son; at his birth he called him "a prodigy of beauty & intellect", and named him after his own grandfather Erasmus Darwin. During William's first three years his father kept a diary of gestures and facial expressions the infant made. The studies were part of Darwin's comparison between animal and human development, after he had already thoroughly studied orangutan babies at the London Zoo. The diary contains observations on the child learning to follow a candle with his eyes after nine days, smiling with his eyes after six weeks and three days, and developing distinctive cries adjusted to specific situations after eleven weeks. He also noticed the development of more profound personality traits, such as reason and, at two-and-a-half years, conscience. Charles Darwin published his findings in the journal Mind in June 1877, in an article titled "A biographical sketch of an infant". The studies were also an influence behind his work The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals, published in 1872. Darwin's work on infant development and child psychology inspired other academics, such as the German psychologist William Preyer and the American James Mark Baldwin, who acknowledged Darwin's influence in his 1913 History of Psychology.
William was a keen amateur photographer, and took several portraits of members of his family.
William Darwin and his wife are buried in St. Nicolas' Church, North Stoneham, Hampshire; having lived in Bassett, near Southampton, Hampshire.

Theodor Langhans (28 September 1839 – 22 October 1915) was a German pathologist who was a native of Usingen, Duchy of Nassau.
He studied medicine at the University of Heidelberg, and at the University of Göttingen under Friedrich Gustav Jakob Henle (1809–1885), at Berlin under Rudolf Virchow (1821–1902) and in Würzburg, where he became an assistant to Friedrich Daniel von Recklinghausen (1833–1910). In 1867 he became a lecturer at the University of Marburg, and in 1872 became a full professor of pathology at the University of Giessen, where he succeeded Ludwig Franz Alexander Winther (1812–1871).
From 1872 until 1912, Langhans was a professor of pathological anatomy at the University of Bern, where one of his assistants was surgeon Fritz de Quervain (1868–1940). He also worked with Serafina Schachova on kidney anatomy research using a canine model of induced nephritis.Langhans is remembered for his discovery of multi-nucleated giant cells that are found in granulomatous conditions, and are now referred to as Langhans giant cells.

Bruno Paulin Gaston Paris (French pronunciation: [ɡastɔ̃ paʁis]; 9 August 1839 – 5 March 1903) was a French literary historian, philologist, and scholar specialized in Romance studies and medieval French literature. He was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1901, 1902, and 1903.

Hans Thoma (2 October 1839 – 7 November 1924) was a German painter.

Paul Georges Dieulafoy (18 November 1839 – 16 August 1911) was a French physician and surgeon. He is best known for his study of acute appendicitis and his description of Dieulafoy's lesion, a rare cause of gastric bleeding.