Johann Friedrich Blumenbach

Johann Friedrich Blumenbach was a German medical doctor, naturalist, physiologist and anthropologist, born in Gotha in 1752. He studied medicine at Jena and Göttingen and graduated in 1775 with a thesis on the natural variety of mankind. At Göttingen he became professor of medicine and curator of the natural history museum, and his Institutiones Physiologicae of 1787 served for decades as a standard German physiology textbook. He treated humans as part of natural history, compared their anatomy with that of other animals, and gave the woolly mammoth its first scientific name. He is regarded as a founder of physical anthropology and was called the founder of racial classifications, a legacy now widely criticized. He died in 1840.