Philipp Friedrich Theodor Meckel

Philipp Friedrich Theodor Meckel was a German anatomist, surgeon and obstetrician who lived from 1755 to 1803. Born in Berlin, he was the son of the anatomy professor Johann Friedrich Meckel, and two of his own sons, Johann Friedrich and August Albrecht, also became anatomists. He studied medicine at Göttingen and Strasbourg and took his doctorate in 1777 with a dissertation on the labyrinth of the inner ear, then made a long study trip to Paris, London and Edinburgh. From 1779 he was professor of anatomy and surgery at the University of Halle, and in 1788 he also took charge of the surgical unit at the hospital in Glaucha. The Russian royal family summoned him to St. Petersburg as an obstetrician in 1795 and again in 1797. At Halle he kept up and enlarged the anatomical collection begun by his father, known as the Meckel collections. His publications include a translation of Baudelocque on childbirth, issued as Anleitung zur Entbindungskunst in 1782 and 1783, and a Latin dissertation on the pain remaining after amputation, later published in English as a study of the phantom limb.