Franz Naegele

Franz Carl Naegele, whose name the German biographical dictionaries also spell Nägele, was a physician who became one of the leading figures in German obstetrics. He was born on 12 July 1778 in Düsseldorf, where his father taught anatomy and surgery at the military medical school, and he died on 21 January 1851 in Heidelberg. After studying at Strasbourg, Freiburg and Bamberg, where he took his doctorate in 1800, he worked as a district physician in Barmen and Beyenburg, concentrating on childbirth and women's diseases and teaching surgeons and midwives. He was called to the University of Heidelberg in 1807 and became full professor and director of its maternity hospital in 1810. The Neue Deutsche Biographie credits him with a strictly systematic presentation of obstetrics, a description of the mechanism of normal birth, new knowledge of the female pelvis, and a textbook for midwives published in 1830.