Abstract
THERE must be many who have hailed with delight the announcement of “Erlebtes und Erstrebtes,” the authentic account of the long and assiduous life of the founder and elaborator of modern comparative anatomy. However, the readers of the little brochure will be sadly disappointed, since it contains not much Erlebtes, and the author is more than reluctant about telling us what he has “Erstrebt,” i.e. striven for and reached. Most of the reminiscences can be of interest only to his own family. Born at Würzburg August 21,1826, sprung from a family of mostly Governmental officials, mainly of Bavarian descent, Gegenbaur went through his schooling at Würzburg and spent the vacations roaming about with his gun, dissecting his spoil. He is emphatic about the value of the studies of the classics; “to ignore the classical languages means to resign part of our education, and those who say that these languages are dead, ought to remember that the letter killeth, but the spirit giveth life.” Würzburg was also his university, where, after eighteen months of preliminary philosophical and historical studies, he was inscribed as a medical student. In the same year, 1847, Albert Koelliker was called to the university. F. Leydig was privat docent for microscopical anatomy, and for him our author has high praise. Another of his teachers was R. Virchow, “whose great merit is that he gave a new, very fertile, direction not only to pathology, but to the whole of anatomy, by imparting to it the notion of evolution.”
Erlebtes und Erstrebtes.
Von Carl Gegenbaur. Mit einem Bildniss des Verfassers. Pp. 114. (Leipzig: Wilhelm Engelmann, 1901.) Price 2s.
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G., H. Erlebtes und Erstrebtes . Nature 65, 316 (1902). https://doi.org/10.1038/065316a0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/065316a0