Johann Friedrich Blumenbach

Johann Friedrich Blumenbach , born the May 11th 1752 with Gotha and dead the January 22nd 1840 with Göttingen, is a anthropologist and German biologist .

Biography

He studies the Médecine with Iéna and obtains his doctorate with Göttingen in 1775. It is interested very early in the Natural history and collects the skeletons.

He teaches the Anatomie in Göttingen lasting nearly 60 years and will have a considerable influence on generations of students like Blasius Merrem (1761-1824), Samuel Thomas Sömmerring (1755-1830), Johann Heinrich Friedrich Link (1767-1851), Christian Rudolph Wilhelm Wiedemann (1770-1840), Heinrich Boie (1794-1827) or Arnold Adolph Berthold (1803-1861). He becomes foreign member of the Royal Society in 1793. Marie Jean-Pierre Flourens (1794-1867) pronounces his Éloge in 1847 in front of the Institut.

These treaties of anatomy are republished and translated several times during the 19th century. Facsimiles of Of generis humani varietate nativa and Über die natürlichen Verschiedenheiten im Menschengeschlechte were published in 2001.

Its contribution in anthropology

Its most known contribution as regards Anthropologie is the definition of the concept of race in the human concrete cases. This definition was victim of a notable misinterpretation by the commentators, and one came from there to consider that he was the first promoter of the concept of a human race like closed group equipped with durable hereditary characteristics. Actually, Blumenbach is above all holding it of the theory known as degenerationnist, according to whom all the men come from a single stock, and are different only under the terms of progressive and reversible climatic modifications. It is what it calls the phenomenon of the degeneration (Abartung). He regards in fact the races as beings of reason, instruments of approximation to seize the human diversity, which is in fact a continuum passing by negligible transitions. It is only under the influence of Emmanuel Kant, which published various treaties on the human races between 1775 and 1788, that Blumenbach revises its positions in the middle of the years 1790 and admits that certain differentiations of the phenotype could be irreversible. Kant considered that the mankind at its origin was equipped with germs likely to be activated by such or such climate in order to adapt to it. It is according to him the mechanism of the raciation of the mankind. In both cases, as opposed to what one believed, Kant and Blumenbach is convinced of the unit of the mankind. Blumenbach is the champion of the Monogénisme against some of its contemporaries, in particular the anatomist Samuel Thomas Sömmerring and the historian and essay writer Christoph Meiners.

200 years later, after multiple mésinterprétations, the theory of Blumenbach will be confirmed by the modern biology which shows the origin Monophylétique of the mankind.

List partial of the publications

1783 - 1788: Medicinische Bibliothek (Göttingen: J.C. Dieterich).
1786 : Institutiones physiologicae (Göttingen: J.C. Dieterich, fourth edition in 1821) - translated into French under the title of physiological Institutions… by Jean-François Xavier Pugnet (1765-1846) (Lyon: J. - T. Raymann).
1786 : Introductio in historiam medicinae litterariam (Göttingen: J.C. Dieterich).
1787 : D. OJ. Frid. Blumenbachii,… of Nisu formativo and generationis negotio nuperae observationes (Göttingen: J.C. Dieterich).
1788 : D. OJ. Frid. Blumenbachii,… Commentatio of VI vitali sanguinis, recitata in consensu sollenni Plowshare reg. scientiar. inter semisaecularia Academiae (Göttingen: J.C. Dieterich).
1788 : Synopsis systematica scriptorum quibus India ab inauguratione Academiae Georgiae Augustae D. Sept. 17, 1737 usque AD sollemnia istius inaugurationis semisaecularia 1787 disciplinam suam augere and ornare studuerunt professores medici gottingenses, digessit and edidit OJ. France Blumenbach (Göttingen: J.C. Dieterich).
1790 : OJ. Frid. Blumenbachii,… Decafs I (- VI) collectionis suae craniorum diversarum gentium it (Göttingen: J.C. Dieterich).
1795 : De Generis humani varietate nativa (Göttingen: Vandenhoek and Ruprecht) - translated into French under the title of Of the Unit of mankind and of its varieties, work preceded by a letter with Joseph Banks, baronet and chair Royal Company of London by Frederic Charles Chardel (1776-1849) (Paris: Allut).
1796 - 1805: Abbildunge naturhistorischer Gegenstände (Göttingen: J.H. Dieterich).
1798 : Über die natürlichen Verschiedenheiten im Menschgeschlechte... (Leipzig: Breitkopf and Härtel).
1803 : terrarumque Specimen archoeologiae telluris imprimis Hannoveranarum (Göttingen: H. Dieterich).
1803 : Manual of natural history , translated from German by François Artaud de Soulange (two volumes, Metz: Collignon).
1805 : Handbuch DER vergleichenden Anatomy (Göttingen: H. Dieterich, republished in the same editor in 1807).
1806 : Vergleichende Anatomy und Physiology den Verdauungswerkzeuge der Säugethiere und Vögel (Berlin).
1807 : Geschichte und Beschreibung der Knochen of the menschlichen Körpers. Zweyte sehr vermehrte Ausgabe (Göttingen: H. Dieterich).
1807 : has off System Shorts comparative anatomy translates by William Lawrence (1785-1867) (London: Longman, Hurst, Rees and Orme).
1808 : Specimen historiae naturalis, antiquae artis operibus it, eaque vicissim it (Göttingen: H. Dieterich).
1810 : Abbildunge naturhistorischer Gegenstände (Göttingen: H. Dieterich).

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