Johann Friedrich Blumenbach
| Johann Friedrich Blumenbach | |
|---|---|
 | |
| Born | 11 May 1752 Gotha, Saxe-Gotha-Altenburg, Holy Roman Empire |
| Died | 22 January 1840 (aged 87) Göttingen, Kingdom of Hanover, German Confederation |
| Fields | Physiology |
| Institutions | Göttingen |
| Alma mater | University of Jena University of Göttingen |
| Doctoral advisor | Christian Wilhelm Büttner[1] |
| Other academic advisors | Ernst Gottfried Baldinger Christian Gottlob Heyne |
| Doctoral students | Johann Heinrich Friedrich Link Friedrich Stromeyer Karl Theodor Ernst von Siebold |
| Known for | Comparative anatomy; scientific racism |
| Influenced | Alexander von Humboldt |
Johann Friedrich Blumenbach (11 May 1752 – 22 January 1840) was a German physician, naturalist, physiologist and anthropologist, one of the first to study mankind as an aspect of natural history and to research race, and whose studies on morphology led him to identify five races.
Contents
Life
Blumenbach was born at his family house in Gotha. His father was Heinrich Blumenbach, a local school headmaster; his mother, Charlotte Eleonore Hedwig Buddeus, was the daughter of a high-ranking official in Gotha's government. He was born into a well-connected family of academics. Blumenbach was educated at the Illustrious Gymnasium in Gotha. He studied medicine at Jena, and then at Göttingen. In 1775, Blumenbach received his medical degree from the University of Göttingen after completing his dissertation, "De Generis Humani Varietate Native Liber" ("On the Natural Varieties of Mankind"), which was first published in 1775, is considered an influential work in race and craniometry research. This text showed that the variations that exist in the human form do not represent differences between human species. In his dissertation, he also introduced the term Caucasian as a term for white Europeans. He was appointed extraordinary professor of medicine in 1776 and ordinary professor in 1778.
He was elected a Foreign Member of the Royal Society of London in 1793, a Foreign Honorary Member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1794, a Foreign Member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences in 1813, and a Member of the Academy of Sciences at Paris in 1831. Blumenbach's peers considered him one of the great theorists of his day, and he was a mentor or influence on many of the next generation of German biologists .
His morphological research were adopted by other researchers. Blumenbach's work was used by many biologists and comparative anatomists in the nineteenth century who were interested in the origin of races: Wells, Lawrence, Prichard, Huxley and William Flower are good examples of his influence on human biology.
- Blumenbach's dissertation is an early demonstration of comparative anatomy to objectively study human history. While earlier scholars, like Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon, in France, had created classifications of humans, they based their works largely on subjective behavioral characteristics and cultural biases. Blumenbach argued that there are five distinct races of mankind within a single species, a conclusion he derived from detailed studies of skulls and human anatomy. Although Blumenbach recognized distinct races, he also believed in the unity of the human species, and he combated the use of anthropology as a means to promote discrimination. Following the publication of his dissertation, Blumenbach became curator of the natural history collection at the University of Göttingen. In 1778 he became a professor of medicine and married the daughter of an administrator at the university. The following year, Blumenbach published Handbuch der Naturgeschichte (Handbook of Natural History), in which he evaluated morphological and ecological evidence from which he created a system to classify organisms. Blumenbach believed that the Linnaean system of classification, developed by Carl Linnaeus in the 1735 text Systema Naturae, published while Linnaeus was in the Netherlands, defined species on the basis of single, often arbitrarily chosen, characteristics, a practice that many thought produced artificial groups that did not accurately reflect nature. Blumenbach hoped to correct these supposed problems with the Linnaean system by defining species based on a series of morphological characters, which he presented in his Handbuch. He also recognized the potential for species to change through time or to become extinct. Blumenbach later expanded on those topics in his Beiträge zur Naturgeschichte (Contributions to Natural History), in which he further investigated individual variability and the possibility that the Earth had a long history. In 1780 Blumenbach presented his concept of Bildungstrieb, or the formative force, an idea that influenced many in an embryological debate of his time and that affected developmental research and natural philosophy for more than a century. In his paper, "Über den Bildungstrieb (Nisus Formativus) und Seinen Einfluss auf die Generation und Reproduktion" ("On the Formative Force and its Influence on Generation and Reproduction") Blumenbach described Bildungstrieb as a force within all organisms that operated on their bodies throughout development in order to give rise to their final forms. Blumenbach's Bildungstrieb concept influenced the debate between preformationists and epigenesists, as it attacked the assumptions underlying preformationism. According to preformationism, an organism existed fully formed within the egg or sperm (germ cell), and the process of development was one of the animal unfolding, or growing, from its miniature germinal form to more mature and adult forms. Many scholars, such as Albrecht von Haller, in Switzerland, Marcello Malpighi, in Italy, and Jan Swammerdam, in the Netherlands, believed that some form of preformationism best explained development. On the other hand, according to epigenesis, each embryo generated anew by gradually developing from unorganized materials, a theory supported by the Caspar Friedrich Wolff, in Russia.
- Previous authors, such as Wolff, had offered notions similar to Bildungstrieb, of vital forces that shaped the body. However, Blumenbach's concept went beyond those offered by other scholars, as it reinforced the arguments for epigenesis. He provided a framework for understanding a force for development that was both teleological, in that it acted towards a final form, and constitutive, in that it could organize development. Blumenbach applied his Bildungstrieb concept in his following works and various scholars utilized his concept. In the second edition of On the Natural Varieties of Mankind, Blumenbach used Bildungstrieb to explain the degeneration of an original type of human into the five varieties—which he later classified as Caucasian, Mongolian, Malayan, Ethiopian, and American—found around the world. In Contributions to Natural History, published in 1790, Blumenbach described how Bildungstrieb operated after the Biblical flood to produce new species. The concept was adopted by the writer and natural philosopher Johann Wolfgang von Goethe in Germany, and the philosopher Immanuel Kant in Prussia. Nearly one hundred years after Blumenbach's formulation of the concept, Ernst Haeckel, the chair of zoology at the University of Jena, employed Bildungstrieb as the foundation of his theories on individual development—theories which influenced embryological research well into the twentieth century. Blumenbach participated in more than seventy academies and scientific organizations, and he continued to teach at the University of Göttingen during his later years. His textbook, Handbuch der Vergleichenden Anatomie (Handbook of Comparative Anatomy), published in 1805, influenced many throughout the history of comparative anatomy. In 1816 Blumenbach earned the appointment professor primarius of the Faculty of Medicine. Throughout his tenure at Göttingen, Blumenbach taught many students, such as the naturalist Alexander von Humboldt, and the early proponent of recapitulation theory, Carl Friedrich Kielmeyer. An active naturalist throughout life, Blumenbach was among the first to describe the wooly mammoth, Mammuthus primigenius, and he helped name the platypus, Ornithorhynchus anatinus. He helped turn the natural history collection at the University of Göttingen into one of the first anthropological museums in the world, as he amassed and catalogued skulls, hair, skins, casts, and pictures from places around the world. When Blumenbach was appointed curator in 1776, the collection housed 85 skulls; when he died on 22 January 1840, the collection had grown to 245 skulls with detailed accounts of their origin. Blumenbach's skull collection, including the skulls that formed the basis of his dissertation and his theory of the five varieties of human, persisted at the University of Göttingen into the twenty-first century.[2]
Blumenbach's races
On the basis of his craniometric research (analysis of human skulls), Blumenbach divided the human species into five races:
- the Caucasian or white race
- the Mongolian or yellow race
- the Malayan or brown race
- the Ethiopian or black race
- the American or red race
Blumenbach argued that physical characteristics like skin color, cranial profile, etc., were correlated with group character and aptitude. He interpreted craniometry and phrenology to make physical appearance correspond with racial categories.
Like other early monogenists, before modern understanding of genetics, his explanation for the causes of racial differences was environmental differences, even believing that morphological differences between races would slowly disappear if the environments changed. He has been described as rejecting certain politically sensitive mental differences between races, citing certain accomplished non-White individuals, but the existence of such individuals does not mean that group averages are equal.
Blumenbach's work included his description of sixty human crania (skulls) published originally as Collectionis suae craniorum diversarum gentium illustratae decades (1790–1828). This was a founding work of craniometry. More generally, his morphological research was used by other researchers.
Edition of the Correspondence of Johann Friedrich Blumenbach
- The project was dedicated to the indexing of the correspondence of Johann Friedrich Blumenbach (1752-1840), a central figure in the biological and geological science of the late 18th century, which is of great importance in the history of science. The transcribed letters to and from Johann Friedrich Blumenbach (ca. 3000), which are in the estate of Dr. Frank William Peter Dougherty, who died in 1994, were successively annotated in English and published, including newly discovered pieces. The edition also gains significance by making letters from the Blumenbach family's possession accessible for the first time. This makes it possible to correct, enrich or reinterpret numerous details in scientific publications. Since understanding the facts and contexts sometimes requires a more in-depth study of the letters, the "Kleine Beiträge zur Blumenbach-Forschung" (Small Contributions to Blumenbach Research) were published in six volumes as a special publication organ as a net publication from 2008 to 2014. Reference is made to the "Letter volumes" to relieve the annotation apparatus. The first two volumes of "The Correspondence of Johann Friedrich Blumenbach" appeared in print in 2006 and 2007, and volumes 3 to 6 in the years 2010 to 2015 as a net publication.[4]
See also
External links
- Johann Friedrich Blumenbach, Encyclopædia Britannica
- Johann-Friedrich-Blumenbach Institut für Zoologie und Anthropologie (Schwann-Schleiden Research Center, Göttingen)
References
- ↑ Chemistry Tree profile Johann Friedrich Blumenbach
- ↑ Johann Friedrich Blumenbach (1752-1840)
- ↑ (Dec 22, 2007) "The beautiful skull and Blumenbach's errors: The birth of the scientific concept of race". BMJ 335 (7633): 1308–1309. doi:10.1136/bmj.39413.463958.80. PMID 18156242.
- ↑ Prof. Dr. Martin Mulsow, Director (Gotha Research Centre)
