Johann Friedrich Meckel

Johann Friedrich Meckel
Johann Friedrich Meckel the Younger
Born	October 17, 1781 Halle
Died	October 31, 1833(1833-10-31) (aged 52)
Nationality	Germany
Fields	anatomy, pathology
Institutions	University of Halle
Alma mater	University of Halle
Known for	teratology
Influences	Georges Cuvier Jean-Baptiste Lamarck

Johann Friedrich Meckel (October 17, 1781 – October 31, 1833), often referred to as Johann Friedrich Meckel, the Younger, was a German anatomist born in Halle. He worked as a professor of anatomy, pathology and zoology at the University of Halle, Germany.

In 1802, he received his medical doctorate from the University of Halle, defending his doctoral thesis De cordis conditionibus abnormibus on 8 April 1802. At Halle he had as instructors, Kurt Sprengel (1766-1833) and Johann Christian Reil (1759-1813). After graduation, Meckel continued his education in Würzburg, Vienna and Paris. In Paris, he assisted zoologist Georges Cuvier (1769–1832) with systematic analysis of anatomical and zootomical specimens. In 1810 he finished translating Cuvier's five-volume Leçons d’anatomie Comparée from French into German.

In 1808, he became a full professor of normal and pathological anatomy, surgery and obstetrics at the University of Halle, replacing Justus Christian Loder (1753-1832). From 1826 to 1833, he was editor of the Archiv für Anatomie und Physiologie. In 1829, he was elected a foreign member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences.

Meckel adopted naturalist Jean-Baptiste Lamarck's (1744–1829) evolutionary beliefs. He was a pioneer in the science of teratology, in particular the study of birth defects and abnormalities that occur during embryonic development. He believed that abnormal development adhered to the same natural laws as did normal development. With French embryologist Étienne Serres (1786–1868), the "Meckel-Serres Law" is named, defined as a theory of parallelism between the stages of ontogeny and the stages of a unifying pattern in the organic world ("scala naturae").