Philipp Jakob Cretzschmar

Philipp Jakob Cretzschmar ( born June 11, 1786 in Sulzbach, † May 4, 1845 in Frankfurt am Main ) was a German anatomist and zoologist.

Life and work

Philipp Jakob Cretzschmar was the son of Otto Cretzschmar Sulzbacher pastor and his wife Anna Katharina nee Eberhardt. Philipp Jakob Cretzschmar studied natural philosophy in 1804 in Würzburg and later medicine in Halle ( Saale). After his expulsion by Napoleon in 1807, he returned to Würzburg, where he passed his examination and received his doctorate. In 1808 he was a military doctor in the French army and participated in the Battle of Wagram. Until 1813, he remained as a regimental doctor only in French, then in Grand Duke of Wurzburg services and was used in Spain. After working as a surgeon in Vienna and Paris, he practiced as a physician in Frankfurt am Main where he taught anatomy and zoology at the Senckenberg Medical Institute. He married Katharina Müller Josephina.

He was one of the founders of the Senckenberg Nature Research Society, which he became director in 1817 and which he ran for nearly 30 years. With Eduard Rüppell, a founding member of the Society, he published his research results of an expedition to Africa. In Rüppell's Atlas of travel in North Africa, published in Frankfurt from 1826 to 1828, he bought the ornithological department, in which he described some thirty new species of birds including the Goldbugpapagei, the Goliath heron, the Grauortolan that Nubiertrappe and " Scotocerca inquieta ". Cretzschmars preparations formed the basis for the collection of the Natural History Museum Senckenberg in Frankfurt am Main.

Cretzschmar has been taken by the French Feldloge Les amis de la vraie regle in Perpignan as a Freemason; on March 24, 1815 he was affiliated by the Frankfurt Masonic Lodge Socrates to steadfastness in which he then among other things as a speaker and from 1834 to 1842 served as Worshipful Master. 1838-44 he published his work " religious systems of Freemasonry ".

In 1828 he was elected a member of the Leopoldina.

Afterlife

Since 1917, the Senckenberg Nature Research Society awarded (since 2008: Senckenberg Nature Research Society ) to commemorate its first president, Philipp Jakob Cretzschmar, at irregular intervals, the Cretzschmar Medal in recognition of outstanding scientific achievements.