Albrecht von haller biography of george

HALLER, Albrecht von (1708-77: Deutsche Biographie)

As a foreign and "prior" author, Haller can be given only a cursory headnote. Renowned throughout Europe for his scientific achievements, he was also a poet--and an influential one. Born on 16 Oct. 1708, he was the son of Niklaus Emanuel Haller (1672-1721), a lawyer from a well established family in Bern, Switzerland, and his wife Anna Maria Engel. He himself married three times; although his first two wives died young along with their two children, his third wife, Sofie Amalia Cristina Teichmeyer, whom he married in 1741, gave him three sons and three daughters who grew to maturity. He studied at the universities of Tübingen and Leiden, where he earned his medical degree in 1727. Further studies in England, France, and Germany extended his knowledge of mathematics and botany, widened his circle of correspondents, and laid the foundation of his fame as a polymath. George II appointed him to a chair at the University of Göttingen in 1736 and made him his personal physician. He was ennobled as Baron von Haller in 1749. He stayed at Göttingen until 1753, when he resigned to return to Switzerland. His productivity was extraordinary, notably in the areas of physiology and botany but also in literature. His most famous poem, "Die Alpen," was composed in 1729 and published in his first collection, Gedichte ("Poems") in 1832. Some of his prose fiction, many of his scientific works, and a memoir were translated earlier but the two works in this bibliography were the first volumes in English devoted to his verse. He died at Bern on 12 Dec. 1777. (deutsche-biographie.de 10 Jan. 2022; Encyclopaedia Britannica [1911]; Nouvelle biographie générale [1852-66] 23, cols 168-80; WorldCat) HJ

Swiss anatomist, physiologist, naturalist and poet (1708–1777)

Albrecht von Haller (also known as Albertus de Haller; 16 October 1708 – 12 December 1777) was a Swissanatomist, physiologist, naturalist, encyclopedist, bibliographer and poet. A pupil of Herman Boerhaave and Jacob Winslow, he is sometimes referred to as "the father of modern physiology."

Early life

Haller was born into an old Swiss family at Bern. Prevented by long-continued ill-health from taking part in boyish sports, he had more opportunity for the development of his precocious mind. At the age of four, it is said, he used to read and expound the Bible to his father's servants; before he was ten he had sketched a Biblical Aramaic grammar, prepared a Greek and a Hebrew vocabulary, compiled a collection of two thousand biographies of famous men and women on the model of the great works of Bayle and Moréri, and written in Latin verse a satire on his tutor, who had warned him against a too great excursiveness. When still hardly fifteen he was already the author of numerous metrical translations from Ovid, Horace and Virgil, as well as of original lyrics, dramas, and an epic of four thousand lines on the origin of the Swiss confederations, writings which he is said on one occasion to have rescued from a fire at the risk of his life, only, however, to burn them a little later (1729) with his own hand.

Medicine

Haller's attention had been directed to the profession of medicine while he was residing in the house of a physician at Biel after his father's death in 1721. While still a sickly and excessively shy youth, he went in his sixteenth year to the University of Tübingen (December 1723), where he studied under Elias Rudolph Camerarius Jr. and Johann Duvernoy. Satisfied with his progress, he in 1725 exchanged Tübingen for Leiden, where Boerhaave was in the zenith of his fame, and where Albinus had alread

Like many of his contemporaries, John Pringle (1707-1782), the author of a pioneering book on military medicine, physician to Queen Charlotte and King George III, president of the Royal Society, and friend of many notables in London (Benjamin Franklin was his frequent traveling companion), took his correspondences seriously. Without doubt his most important, spanning the years 1760-77, was with Albrecht von Haller (1708-1777) - poet, physician, and celebrated professor of anatomy, surgery, and botany at the University of Göttingen before returning in 1753 to his native Switzerland, where he held governmental posts, published a monumental physiology textbook and a multivolume medical bibliography, among many other works, and kept up a vast correspondence. Pringle emerged as his chief epistolary link to Britain.
The eighty-four surviving letters by Pringle, only snippets of which have ever been published, are here presented in full. Although the originals of Haller’s letters were destroyed, paraphrases of surviving excerpts from fifty-one of them fill some of the gaps.
The correspondence yields a wealth of information about Pringle, who still awaits a full biography, and it adds nuances to our more detailed knowledge of Haller as well. It makes clear, for example, Pringle’s vital role in Haller’s becoming dependent on opium in his final years.
Beyond the personal realm, the letters are especially valuable for their wide-ranging, often detailed discussions of medical theory and practice, but they also reflect and illuminate other aspects of the intellectual, cultural, and social life of the time. Since this was a great age of global exploration, marked by a new scientific interest and climaxed by James Cook’s famous voyages to the South Pacific, it is fitting that Pringle’s letters, drawing on conversations with Cook, Joseph Banks, Daniel Solander, and other voyagers

(b. Bern, Switzerland, 16 October 1708; d. Bern, 12 December 1777)

anatomy, physiology, botany, bibliography.

Haller’s family had been established in Bern since 1550. He was the fifth and last child of Niklaus Emanuel Haller, a jurist, and Anna Maria Engel. His mother died when he was young, and he was raised by his stepmother, Salome Neuhaus. The family was neither rich nor well-connected and had little political influence. Many of its members were reputed to be nervous, secretive, and eccentric.

Haller received his earliest education from a former pastor. Later, after his father’s death, he attended public school in Bern for a year and a half. A child whose health was delicate, he was precocious and gifted in languages. From 1722 to 1723 Haller lived in Biel in the house of his stepuncle Johann Rudolf Neuhaus, a physician who furthered his studies. Among other subjects, Neuhaus tried to instruct Haller in Cartesian philosophy, but Haller rejected it. At this time, however, he began to write poetry and decided to become a physician.

From January 1724 to April 1725 Haller studied medicine at Tübingen, where he learned the fundamentals of botany and anatomy from Johann Duvernoy. The fame of Hermann Boerhaave drew him to Leiden to continue his training; while there he also studied anatomy and surgery with Bernhard Siegfried Albinus. On 23 May 1727, at the age of eighteen, he graduated doctor medicinae—with a thesis proving that what had been called a salivary duct by Coschwiz was in reality a blood vessel.

In 1727–1728 Haller made an academic tour of London, Oxford, Paris, and Strasbourg that ended at Basel, where he studied advanced mathematics with Johann I Bernoulli in the spring and summer of 1728. During the following months he made an alpine journey to further his knowledge of botany. At the same time he began the botanical collection that was to form the basis for his massive work on the Swiss flora. His travels e