Samuel Thomas von Sömmerring

Samuel Thomas Soemmerring, since 1808 Knights of Soemmerring, also Sömmerring ( born January 28, 1755 in Thorn, † March 2, 1830 in Frankfurt am Main ) was a German anatomist, anthropologist, paleontologist and inventor. Soemmerring discovered the " yellow spot " in the retina of the human eye. His research on the brain and nervous system, via the sensory organs on the embryo and its malformations, on the construction of the lungs, about the breaks etc. have made him one of the most important German anatomist.

Career

Samuel Thomas Soemmerring was the ninth child of physician Johann Thomas Soemmerring and the pastor's daughter Regine Geret. In 1774 he finished the education in Toruń and began to study as a 19- year-old medicine at the University of Göttingen. In 1778 he became a doctor of medicine. He became in 1779 professor of anatomy at the Kassel Collegium Carolinum, where he prepared an elephant among others, whose skull Goethe in 1784 loaned to them further his studies of the inter-maxillary bone. Soemmering was a member of the Royal British Society of Sciences in Kassel and employees of Gottingen learned adverts, from 1784, he taught at the University of Mainz. There he spent five years as Head of the School of Medicine and was promoted in 1788 councilor and personal physician. In the same year he became Masons in London. In 1779 he became a member of the Lodge to crowned lion in Kassel and in 1780 with the name " Marmessos " Director of the Kassel Rosicrucian circle. Here he was a friend of Georg Forster. The font Soemmerrings About the organ of the soul was published with a remark Immanuel Kant.

In the year 1795 (1800? ), He opened a practice as a general practitioner in Frankfurt am Main. As one of its many important undertakings Soemmerring led against many odds, a vaccination against smallpox and was a founding member of the Senckenberg Nature Research Society. He received offers from the University of Jena and St. Petersburg, but in 1805 took up a professorship at the Bavarian Academy of Sciences in Munich. King Max I Joseph of Bavaria gave him on May 11, 1808 in Munich Order of Merit of the Bavarian Crown - as Samuel Thomas Knight of Soemmerring he was thus raised to the personal knighthood. In the same year he was raised to Electoral Palatinate Bavarian Councilor and 1808 to the peerage. In 1810 he was privy.

Already in 1778 he had described in his doctoral thesis, the division of the twelve cranial nerves: his study is still valid today. He published many writings in the field, medicine, anatomy and neuroanatomy, also in anthropology, paleontology, astronomy, physics and philosophy, and was an opponent of Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling. Among other things he wrote about prehistoric crocodiles and pterosaurs.

1792 Soemmerring married Margarethe Elisabeth born Grunelius ( 1768-1802 ). The marriage produced a son ( Dietmar Wilhelm, 1793-1871 ) and a daughter went ( 1796-1867 Susanne Katharina ) out.

His theses of the inferiority of black people against European people he derived from the autopsy of the bodies of Africans. His contemporary Johann Friedrich Blumenbach criticized him for it sharp.

Soemmerring also constructed a telescope for celestial observation and put 1809 in Munich before the members of the Royal Academy of Sciences, an electric telegraph before, should be transmitted by electrical decomposition of water at the single letters (a model is now in Frankfurt am Main in the Museum of Communication ). He worked on the finishing of wine, on drawings, which form during the etching of the Meteo traveling on the same, on Sunspots and many others. In 1811 he developed the first telegraph in Bavaria, which is now on display at the Deutsches Museum in Munich, but never found practical application.

Due to the weather left Soemmerring 1820 Munich and moved back to Frankfurt am Main. He was a winner of the Guelph - Order. In 1830 he died there and was buried at Frankfurt 's main cemetery.

After Soemmerring the lunar crater Sömmering, a street in Frankfurt's North, a street and a place in the Mainz Neustadt and Samuel Thomas Soemmerring Prize of the Physical Society of astronomical works are named. Until 1941, there was a Soemmering monument in front of the Frankfurt Zoo.

Works

• About the physical diversity of the Moors from the Europeans, Mainz 1784 ( digitized ) (New edited and annotated by Sigrid Oehler -Klein, Fischer- Verlag, Stuttgart, 1998)
• From the brain and spinal cord, Mainz 1788 (2nd edition 1792)
• From the structure of the human body, 6 vols, Frankfurt am Main 1791-1796 ( 2nd ed 1800; further edition in eight volumes of Bischoff, Henle, among other things, Leipzig 1839-1845; New edited and annotated by Reinhard Hildebrand, until 2012 )
• De humani corporis fabrica, 6 vols, Frankfurt am Main 1794-1801
• De humani corporis morbis vasorum absorbentium, Frankfurt am Main 1795
• Illustrations and descriptions of some Misgeburten [! ] The former were on the anatomical theater at Cassel, Mainz 1795 (edited and annotated by Ulrike New sink, Schwabe Verlag Basel, 2000. )
• About the organ of the soul, Königsberg in 1796 ( with a contribution of Immanuel Kant). ( New edited and annotated by Manfred Wenzel, Schwabe Verlag Basel, 2000. )
• Tabula sceleti feminini, Frankfurt am Main 1798
• Icones embryonum humanorum, Frankfurt am Main 1799 ( New edited and annotated by Ulrike sink, Schwabe Verlag Basel, 2000. )
• Pictures of the human eye, Frankfurt am Main 1801 ( New edited and annotated by Jost Benedum )
• Pictures of the human auditory organ, Frankfurt am Main 1806
• Images of the human organ of taste and voice, Frankfurt am Main 1806
• Pictures of the human organs of smell, 1809
• About an electrical telegraph. In: Memoirs of the Royal Academy of Sciences. Class of mathematics and physics. 1809/1810 (1811 ), pp. 401-414. ( Digitized and full text in German Text Archive )

Soemmerrings correspondence with Georg Forster was published by Hettner (Braunschweig 1878). Soemmerrings correspondence with Johann Wolfgang von Goethe was by Manfred Wenzel published (Stuttgart 1988).