Abstract
PROF. GUSTAV RETZIUS, who died at Stockholm on July 21, aged seventy-seven, did more to enrich anatomical literature than any other man of his time. By his death there comes to an end a line of anatomists that has made Sweden famous for a century and more. Retzius's grandfather was professor of natural history at Lund; his father, Anders Retzius, the intimate friend of Johannes Müller, held the chair of anatomy in the Caroline Medico-Chirurgical Institute, Stockholm, in which he was in due time followed by his son Gustav, who devoted his life to working out, by im proved methods, lines of research commenced by his father. In 1842, the year in which Gustav was born, Anders Retzius recognised that the form of the human head was an important mark of race, and initiated the system of describing the shape of heads and skulls by the proportion which their breadth bears to their length. Like his father, Gustav Retzius was an anthropologist as well as an anatomist; as a young man of twenty-two he collected, edited, and published his father's anthropological researches, and from 1864 until his death devoted much of his time to unravelling the history of the inhabitants of Scandinavia. In 1900 he published a magnificent atlas, giving exact reproductions of ancient Swedish skulls; in 1902 he and his colleague, Prof. Karl Fürst, brought out an exhaustive work on the anthropology of Sweden. He published several papers on the Lapps and on the Finns. In 1909 he was invited by the Royal Anthropological Institute of this country to give the Huxley lecture, which he devoted to “The So-called North European Race of Mankind.” He recognised the merits of the race, but took, as we think, an unnecessarily gloomy view of its future.
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KEITH, A. Gustav Magnus Retzius . Nature 103, 448–449 (1919). https://doi.org/10.1038/103448a0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/103448a0