Johann Blumenbach was born into a wealthy Protestant family, to his father, Heinrich and his mother, Charlotte Eleonore Hedwig Buddeus in Gotta, Germany on May 11,1840. At an early age Blumenbach was exposed to literature and natural science. He completed his Gymnasium studies in 1769. He furthered his studies at the University of Jena and the University of Gottingen. In 1775, at the University of Gottingen, he received his M.D. His studies at Jena and Gottingen influenced his later works. At Jena, his interest was in the study of fossils. In Gottingen, he was interested in natural history. His doctoral dissertation, De generis humani varietate nativa liber, became world-famous, translated in several different languages and is considered one of the basic works on anthropology. It was first published in 1776.
After this, he was appointed professor at Gottingen and in 1778 he was a full professor of medicine. His teachings were on comparative anatomy. In 1788, he married the daughter of Georg Brandes, who held an influential position in the administration at the University of Gottingen and a brother-in-law, Christian Gottlieb Heyne, was a classics scholar. These connections helped strengthen Blumenbach’s influence at the university. In 1816, he was appointed professor primarius of the Faculty of Medicine. Blumenbach's later studies were based mainly on his role as one of founders of physical anthropology. He was one of the first scientists to view man as an object of natural history. He also emphasized the gap between man and animal. He shared the same beliefs with some other early scientists’ views, such as Georges-Louis Leclerc Buffon, that an organism’s morphology was capable of being modified by the environment and that the resultant changes were then inherited.
In Blumenbach’s first edition of De generis humani varietate nativa liber, he followed Carolus Linnaeus’ system. It contains an abundance of newly evaluated morphological and ecological finds. With those studies, Blumenbach concluded a fourfold division of the human family based on geological variables (Mongolian, American, Caucasian, and African). Later on in his third edition (1795), he added a fifth geological variation, the Malayan. He further explained in the third edition that the morphological and physiological differences between these races were mediated by the discriminatory action of an innate formative force. This was an idea that was selectively employed by many other scientists who were having doubts about the validity of traditional environmental explanation of human variation.
In his other work, Handbuch der Naturgeschichte (1779), he presented a compelling argument that zoological classifications should and could be based on structures associated with an animal’s specific functions. With his approach, he made an important contribution to the development of comparative primate anatomy. He noted that humans possessed a unique suite of anatomical characteristics that proved they were exclusively designed to stand and walk upright. Blumenbach began to separate human beings from apes, suggesting that Homo be assigned to a different and separate zoological order. This technique of separation between humans and apes were widely adopted and continued to the mid-19th century.
Well into the mid-19th century, Blumenbach suggested a thesis interest in neuro- and cranioanatomy in which there was a direct correspondence between intelligence of an organism and the level of its structural organization. This thesis was always in speculation and in arguments. Blumenbach was a pioneer collector of human crania and often cited as the fonder of craniology. He analyzed a collection of skulls and published his findings as Collectio craniorum diversarum gentium (1790-1828). His findings established craniometric study. By comparing his cranial collection, he viewed them “from above and from behind, placed in a row on the same plane…then all the most conduces to the racial character of skull…strikes the eye so distinctly at one glance, that is not out of the way to call that view the vertical scale.” (Spencer 186).
Johann Friedrich Blumenbach was a German naturalist and an anthropologist who introduced and developed the science of comparative anatomy. He died in Gottingen, Germany on January 22, 1840.
Gillispie, Charles Coulston. Dictionary of Scientific Biography, Pg 203-204, 1970
Poter, Roy. The Blackwell Companion to the Enlightenment, 1991
Spencer, Frank. History of Physical Anthropology and Encyclopedia, Pg. 183-189, 1997
The Columbia Encyclopedia, Sixth Edition. Copyright 2008 Columbia University Press.
Written By; Suong Su
Edited By: Lillian Dolentz, 2008