Overview

Johann Friedrich Blumenbach (1752-1840) was a prominent German anatomist and early anthropologist who played a major role in elevating science above racial prejudice and toward scientific objectivity. His dissertation On the Unity of Mankind (1795), still recognized for its quality and sound scientific approach to the study of human variation, is considered the starting point of anthropology.

As a professor of medicine at the University of Göttingen, Blumenbach was an influential teacher and respected researcher. His publication Textbook of Comparative Anatomy (1805) was an unprecedented and superior comparative anatomy and physiology text. Through his natural history studies and his research with fossils, Blumenbach developed revolutionary ideas about life on earth, including the recognition that a number of fossil species had become extinct and other species had emerged more recently.

Blumenbach believed the earth and...