Johannes Ranke

Johannes Ranke was a German physiologist and anthropologist, born at Thurnau in 1836 and dead at Munich in 1916. He was the son of the theologian Friedrich Heinrich Ranke, the brother of the pediatrician Heinrich von Ranke and the father of the pulmonologist Karl Ernst Ranke. He studied medicine and natural sciences at Munich, Tübingen, Berlin and Paris, took his medical doctorate at Munich in 1861 and habilitated in 1863 with a thesis on the electrical resistance of living muscle. In the following years he carried out physiological studies on tetanus and human nutrition, and in 1868 he published a textbook of human physiology. From 1876 his interests turned almost wholly to prehistory and physical anthropology, especially the shape of the human skull in prehistoric Bavaria. In 1886 he took the first university chair of anthropology in Germany and published the two volume textbook Der Mensch. A skull measurement, the Ranke angle, is named after him.