Heinrich August Wrisberg

Heinrich August Wrisberg was an eighteenth-century German anatomist, born on 20 June 1739 and died on 29 March 1808. He also published under the Latinized form of his name, Henricus Augustus Wrisberg. He took his medical doctorate at the University of Göttingen in 1763 with a thesis on the first breath, the phrenic nerve and animal heat, and he went on to work there as a professor of medicine and obstetrics. His anatomical work dealt with the sympathetic nervous system, and he described the ganglion of the cardiac plexus that still carries his name, the Wrisberg ganglion. The cuneiform cartilages are sometimes called the Wrisberg cartilages, and two different nerves are known as the nerve of Wrisberg. He also wrote a text on hernias. He was born at Sankt Andreasberg in the Duchy of Brunswick-Lüneburg and died at Göttingen, and Justus Christian Loder and Christoph Wilhelm Hufeland are named among his students.