Friedrich Tiedemann

Friedrich Tiedemann
Tiedemann in 1820
Born	(1781-08-23)23 August 1781 Cassel, Hesse-Kassel (now Kassel, Hesse, Germany)
Died	22 January 1861(1861-01-22) (aged 79) Munich
Nationality	German
Fields	Anatomy
Academic advisors	Georges Cuvier Lorenz Oken
Signature

Friedrich Tiedemann (23 August 1781 – 22 January 1861) was a German anatomist and physiologist.

Tiedemann spent most of his life as professor of anatomy and physiology at Heidelberg, a position to which he was appointed in 1816, after having filled the chair of anatomy and zoology for ten years at Landshut, and died at Munich.^[1] He was elected member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences in 1827.

Early life and education

Tiedemann was born at Cassel, the eldest son of Dietrich Tiedemann (1748–1803), a philosopher and psychologist of considerable repute. He graduated in medicine at Marburg in 1804, but soon abandoned practice.^[1]

Career

Tiedemann devoted himself to the study of natural science, and, upon moving to Paris, France, became an ardent follower of Georges Cuvier. On his return to Germany he maintained the claims of patient and sober anatomical research against the prevalent speculations of the school of Lorenz Oken, whose foremost antagonist he was long reckoned. His remarkable studies of the development of the human brain, as correlated with his father's studies on the development of intelligence, deserve mention.^[1]

Tiedemann was one the first persons to make a scientific contestation of racism, in his article entitled "On the Brain of the Negro, compared with that of the European and the Orang-outang" (1836) he argued based on craniometric and brain measures taken by him from Europeans and black men from different parts of the world that the then-common European belief that Negroes have smaller brains and are thus intellectually inferior is scientifically unfounded and based merely on the prejudice of travelers and explorers.^[2]

Personal life

Two of Tiedemann's sons, Gustav and Heinrich, were casualties of the 1848 uprisings.^{[citation needed]}

Legacy

In 2007, Brazilian geneticist Sergio Pena called Tiedemann an "anti-racist ahead of his time".^[3]

References

Attribution

 This article incorporates text from a publication now in the public domain: Chisholm, Hugh, ed. (1911). "Tiedemann, Friedrich". Encyclopædia Britannica (11th ed.). Cambridge University Press 

External links

• The Great Physiologist of Heidelberg - Friedrich Tiedemann by Stephen Jay Gould