Albrecht von Haller

Albrecht von Haller (Bern, 1708-1777) was a Swiss physician, anatomist, naturalist, botanist and poet who wrote in German and Latin. He is often called the father of modern physiology and stands as the leading figure of the German Enlightenment. His career shows how science and literature could share a single mind in the eighteenth century.

Haller was a sickly child who made up for his lack of boyish games with early reading. By his own family's account, he was reading and expounding the Bible to his father's servants at four, and before fifteen he had written Latin verse, translations of classical poets and a long epic. He studied medicine at Tübingen and then at Leiden under Herman Boerhaave. After spells in London, Paris and Basel, where he took up mathematics and botany, he returned to Switzerland and in 1736 accepted a chair at the newly founded University of Göttingen, where he stayed for seventeen years.

At Göttingen he set up a botanical garden, an anatomical theatre and a museum, and he edited a journal to which he is said to have contributed thousands of articles. In physiology he separated sensibility in nerves from irritability in muscles, and in 1757 he ran experiments meant to tell nerve impulses apart from muscular contractions. In embryology he moved from epigenesis to preformation after studying bird eggs. His most ambitious project, the Bibliotheca medica, was a medical, surgical and anatomical encyclopedia on which he worked for more than thirty years.

As a poet, The Alps (1729) is among the earliest works to praise the mountains, setting the simple life of Alpine herders against the corruption of the lowlands. In his last years he wrote three philosophical novels, Usong, Alfred and Fabius and Cato, which weighed despotism, limited monarchy and aristocratic republicanism. He returned to Bern, held a minor civic post, and died in 1777. His legacy lives on in physiology, alpine botany and the plant genus Halleria, which Linnaeus named in his honour.