Haller, ALBRECHT VON

Haller, ALBRECHT VON, anatomist, botanist, physiologist, and poet, was born at Bern, 16th October 1708. He was a sickly but remarkably precocious child. After a severe course of study, at Tübingen, Leyden (where he graduated in 1727), London, Paris, Oxford, and Basel, he settled down to practise as a physician at Bern in 1729. There, in the course of seven years, his botanical researches, especially on the flora of Switzerland, and his anatomical investigations, spread his fame through Europe, and led to his being called (1736) to fill the chair of Medicine, Anatomy, Botany, and Surgery at the newly-founded university of Göttingen. Here he organised a botanical garden, an anatomical museum and theatre, and an obstetrical school; helped to found the Göttingen Royal Academy of Sciences; wrote a great number of anatomical and physiological works; took an active part in the literary movement which culminated in the golden age of Goethe and Schiller; and interested himself in nearly all the questions of the day. In 1753 this many-sided man resigned his offices and dignities at Göttingen and returned to his beloved Bern, where the rest of his life was spent, his energies being principally occupied with the duties of 'ammman' or magistrate. Nevertheless he found time to write three political romances, and to prepare four large works on the bibliography connected with botany, anatomy, surgery, and medicine. Critics of the standing of Vilmar name him first among the regenerators of German poetry, and give him the credit of beginning the new epoch. His poems were descriptive, didactic, and (the best of them) lyrical. Haller died at Bern, 12th December 1777. His name is particularly connected with muscular irritability, the circulation of the blood, and numerous excellent descriptions, of an anatomico-physiological character, of important parts of the human body. Of his voluminous writings the chief were Icones Anatomicae (1743-50), Opuscula Anatomica Minora (1762-68), Disputatio Anatomicae Selectiores (1746-52), Elementa Physiologiae Corporis Humani (1757-66), De Respiratione (1746-49), De Functionibus Corporis Humani Praecipuarum Partium (1777-78), Opuscula Pathologica (1755), Enumeratio Stirpium Helveticarum (1742), Opuscula Botanica (1749), and Gedichte (1732; new ed. 1882). See Lives by Blösch and Hirzel (1877) and Frey (1879).