Albrecht von Haller
Swiss anatomist, physiologist, naturalist and poet (1708-1777)
Albrecht von Haller (also known as Albertus de Haller; 16 October 1708 – 12 December 1777) was a Swiss anatomist, physiologist, naturalist, encyclopedist, bibliographer and poet. A pupil of Herman Boerhaave and Jacob Winslow, he is sometimes referred to as "the father of modern physiology."
Early life
Haller was born into an old Swiss family at Bern. Prevented by long-continued ill-health from taking part in boyish sports, he had more opportunity for the development of his precocious mind. At the age of four, it is said, he used to read and expound the Bible to his father's servants; before he was ten he had sketched a Biblical Aramaic grammar, prepared a Greek and a Hebrew vocabulary, compiled a collection of two thousand biographies of famous men and women on the model of the great works of Bayle and Moréri, and written in Latin verse a satire on his tutor, who had warned him against a too great excursiveness. When still hardly fifteen he was already the author of numerous metrical translations from Ovid, Horace and Virgil, as well as of original lyrics, dramas, and an epic of four thousand lines on the origin of the Swiss confederations, writings which he is said on one occasion to have rescued from a fire at the risk of his life, only, however, to burn them a little later (1729) with his own hand.
Medicine
Haller's attention had been directed to the profession of medicine while he was residing in the house of a physician at Biel after his father's death in 1721. He went in his sixteenth year to the University of Tübingen as of December 1723, where he studied under Elias Rudolph Camerarius Jr. and Johann Duvernoy. Satisfied with his progress, he in 1725 left Tübingen for the University of Leiden, where Herman Boerhaave was in the zenith of his fame, and where Bernhard Siegfried Albinus had already begun to lecture in anatomy. At that university he graduated in May 1727, undertaking successfully in his thesis to prove that the so-called salivary duct, claimed as a recent discovery by Georg Daniel Coschwitz (1679-1729), was nothing more than a blood-vessel.
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