Hermann Heinrich Ploss

Hermann Heinrich Ploss was a German gynecologist and anthropologist, born in Leipzig in 1819 and dying there in 1885. He became a full professor at the medical faculty of the University of Leipzig, the city where he spent his whole life. Ploss wrote many works on sexual medicine, and later writers have counted him among the founders of comparative gynecology and comparative pediatrics, the study of how birth, childbearing and the care of infants vary between peoples and cultures. His career links clinical medicine with the anthropological habit of describing customs across societies, which is why his name belongs both to the history of gynecology and to the history of medical anthropology. The article this entry rests on gives only brief biographical facts, so this description is correspondingly short on detail.