Meckel, Johann Friedrich

Epoch-making discoveries in comparative anatomy

Johann Friedrich Meckel, known as the "Younger", was destined to become a physician. He was born in a family of prominent physicians. His father, Philipp Friedrich Theodore Meckel (1756-1803) was professor of anatomy and surgical obstetrics at the University of Halle and his grandfather, Johann Friedrich Meckel the "Elder" (1724-1774) was one of Haller’s most brilliant disciples and both had occupied the same prestigious chair.

Meckel's younger brother, August Albrecht Meckel (1790-1892), also had the family's academic attributes and became professor of anatomy and forensic medicine at the University of Bonn in 1821. Johann Friedrich, Jr., however, as a child had an outspoken aversion to medicine in general, and anatomy in particular, maybe as a consequence of his having to help his father perform dissections.

• Still he did become a physician; in fact, the greatest of his family, and one of the greatest anatomists of his time.
• His painstaking observations in comparative and pathological anatomy furnished a wealth of new knowledge, which Meckel attempted to organize along certain evolutionary schemes popular in his day.
• Meckel's father was summoned to St. Petersburg in 1797 to deliver the Czarina's child and Meckel, who was then sixteen years old, had the privilege of accompanying him on this journey.
• In the following year he started his medical studies at Halle, then a bastion of academic freedom and objective scientific inquiry.
• Among his most lasting and impressive contributions was the study of the abnormalities occurring during the embryological development.
• Meckel’s teratology was the first comprehensive description of birth defects, a detailed and sober analysis of a topic which had hitherto been approached with a great deal of fantasy and moral bias.

Meckel medical terms used in modern medicine