Abstract
IN a recent paper (Bull. Hist. Med., 14, 449; 1943) Prof. Max Neuburger remarks that during the eighteenth century inadequate facilities for teaching and research prevented most of the medical schools in Germany from furthering either medical training or scientific research. On the other hand, the medical school at Vienna and the Medical Faculty at Göttingen were remarkable exceptions, and owed their celebrity to two famous pupils of Boerhaave, namely, Gerhard van Swieten at Vienna and Albrecht v. Haller at Göttingen. George II, who founded the University of Göttingen in 1734, invited Haller to fill the vacant chair of medicine, which included anatomy, surgery and botany. Haller had previously spent some time in London, where he made the acquaintance of several English physicians and surgeons such as Sir Hans Sloane, John Pringle and William Cheselden, and frequently quoted British writers, notably Stephen Hales, John Mayow and Thomas Willis, in his own works. During the seventeen years when he resided at Göttingen, he exercised a great influence on the University, being responsible for the erection of an anatomical theatre, a botanical garden and a lying-in institution. He also founded a scientific society of which he was the first and permanent president, and a scientific journal to which he made more than a thousand contributions. Between 1739 and 1744 he completed the six-volume edition of Boerhaave's "Institutiones", for which he was elected a foreign member of the Royal Society. He was also author of numerous other works on anatomy, physiology, medicine, surgery and botany. In 1739 he was appointed physician in ordinary to George II, who conferred a knighthood upon him and made him one of his consultant physicians. Owing to reasons of health, he left Göttingen for Berne in 1753. Many of Haller's successors at Göttingen, as Prof. Neuburger points out, had studied in London. Among them may be mentioned Roederer, Sömmering, Thomas Young and Blumenbach.
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British Medicine and the Göttingen Medical School. Nature 153, 678 (1944). https://doi.org/10.1038/153678b0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/153678b0