Christoph Theodor Aeby

Christoph Theodor Aeby (25 February 1835 to 7 July 1885) was a Swiss anatomist and anthropologist whose chief interest was comparative anatomy. Born at Phalsbourg in Lorraine, the son of a farmer who held a large tract of land in Alsace, he studied medicine at Basel and Gottingen. In 1863 he became professor of anatomy at the University of Bern, serving as academic rector in 1866 and 1867, and in 1884 he moved to the University of Prague as successor to Carl Toldt. His students included the surgeons Stefania Berlinerblau and Cesar Roux. He built a large collection of bones at Bern, devised a craniometric method for describing skull shape, studied microcephaly, and published a monograph on the bronchial tree of mammals and humans in 1880. Two eponyms record his work: Aeby's plane, a craniometric plane through the nasion and basion, and Aeby's muscle, the depressor labii inferioris. He died at Bilin in Bohemia aged fifty.