Johann Friedrich Meckel, the Elder

Johann Friedrich Meckel the Elder (1724 to 1774) was a German anatomist born in Wetzlar. He is called the Elder to tell him apart from his grandson Johann Friedrich Meckel, also an anatomist and known as the Younger, and his son and a second grandson were anatomists as well, so that a recent paper describes the family as a four-generation dynasty of anatomists. He took his medical doctorate at the University of Göttingen in 1748, and in his thesis on the fifth cranial nerve he documented his discovery of the submandibular ganglion. He then moved to Berlin, where he worked as a prosector and taught classes on midwifery, and in 1751 he became a professor of anatomy, botany and obstetrics. Several anatomical eponyms carry his name, among them Meckel's cave, a cavity in the dura mater that covers the trigeminal ganglion, and Meckel's ganglion, better known as the sphenopalatine ganglion. He began an anatomical collection that his son and grandson continued, now about 7000 exhibits held at the Martin Luther University of Halle-Wittenberg, and in 1773 he was elected a foreign member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences.