Johann Georg Ritter von Zimmermann

Johann Georg Ritter von Zimmermann ( born December 8, 1728 in Brugg (Canton Aargau ); † October 7, 1795 in Hannover) was a Swiss physician, scholar, philosopher and writer, who worked in Hannover since 1768.

Life

Johann Georg Zimmermann studied only rhetoric, history and philosophy in Bern, afterwards Medicine in Göttingen, where he was a pupil of his Swiss compatriot Albrecht von Haller. After graduation, he was from 1752 doctor in Bern, 1754 in his home town of Brugg. 1755 began his life extraordinarily prolific career as a writer. In 1760 he was elected a foreign member of the Bavarian Academy of Sciences.

Since 1768, he was " Royal Great Britain shear Councilor and personal physician " in Hannover at the court of George III. , The workplace of his last three decades of life was. Zimmermann was also a physician and medical advisor to many crowned heads. The Prussian king Frederick II called him as an interlocutor and doctors in 1786 to Potsdam. Zimmermann stayed from June 23 to July 11, 1786 for the treatment of Frederick Sanssouci in Potsdam and on. His record of the progress of the treatment and his conversations with the terminally ill, he published in 1788 under the title "On Frederick the Great, and my conversations with him shortly before his death."

Zimmermann met several times Goethe. His main work over the solitude in which the then current theme of melancholy played a major role, was released 1784/85 and made Zimmermann widely known in Europe at that time formed. The Russian empress Catherine II elevated him to knighthood in 1786. In his last years, Zimmermann became the enemy of the Enlightenment, even the informers of progressive personalities. He became embroiled in a legal battle with Adolph Freiherr Knigge, the author of the famous book about dealing with people, and eventually became the object of satire of Georg Christoph Lichtenberg.

Johann Georg Zimmermann was the personal physician of Hannover Mayor Ernst Anton saint. According to tradition, a carpenter should have the Hanoverian Hofbotaniker Friedrich Ehrhart informed about the discovery of mineral springs Heiliger fountain in the Eilenriede.

Zimmermann's grave is on the New Town Cemetery in Hanover. Partial reductions are in the Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz Library, as well as in the municipal archives of Hanover.

Heinrich Matthias Marcard, also farm and personal physician, was friends with Zimmermann and published posthumously a biography about him.

Important works

• Dissertatio de physiologica irritabilitate (1751 )
• Reflections on loneliness (1756 ), From solitude (1773 ), On the loneliness (1783 /84)
• From the National Proud ( 1758)
• From among the people of the Ruhr in 1765, and those with the same penetrated prejudices, together with some general outlook in the healing of these prejudices ( 1767).
• About Frederick the Great and my interview with him shortly before his death (1788 )