Felix von Luschan

Felix Ritter von Luschan, born on 11 August 1854 in the Austrian Empire and dead on 7 February 1924, was a medical doctor who became one of the leading physical anthropologists and ethnographers of his day. He studied medicine at the University of Vienna and anthropology in Paris with an emphasis on craniometry, took his doctorate in 1878 and served as an army doctor in occupied Bosnia before working at the Vienna General Hospital. From 1886 he worked at the Royal Museum of Ethnology in Berlin, rose to head its Africa and Oceania department, and in 1911 took the first chair of anthropology at the Frederick William University of Berlin. He is remembered for the von Luschan chromatic scale, a set of thirty-six glass tiles used to classify skin colour. Although he rejected scientific racism in his writing, his collecting of human remains, including victims of the Herero and Nama genocide, is now a subject of critical scrutiny.