Frequently cited in the literature as the ‘Father of Scientific Anthropology’, the comparative anatomist Johann Friedrich Blumenbach played a formative role in establishing anthropology as a scientific discipline in the late 18th and early 19th centuries. Formally a professor of medicine at the University of Göttingen in the German Duchy of Hannover, his career as an academic spanned a remarkably long and productive six decades between 1776 to his retirement in 1835.

It was a time that witnessed anthropology’s rise from the Enlightenment’s more humanistic and philosophical orientation in the study of man to a more directed scientific approach in establishing it as a separate branch of study. In the German-speaking lands in particular, a concerted effort among a relatively large and varied group of thinkers emerged to ground the study of man on firmer scientific principles, with numerous books related to anthropology appearing at this time. This purposive and deliberate shift away from speculative philosophy in the emerging science of man was a gradual one that began around the time of the publication of Ernst Platner’s Anthropologie für Aerzte und Weltweise (Anthropology for Physicians and Sages) in 1772, and would continue on through to the founding of the first anthropological societies in the 1830s and 1840s.

Blumenbach represents a key transitionary figure from 18th century natural history to the beginnings of modern anthropology in the 19th century. In Blumenbach’s work we witness the first consistent attempt at applying modern scientific principles to the study of man.

Holding a chair as professor of medicine in Göttingen was an important contributing factor in this development because the Georg-August-Universität was regarded as the most progressively modern research university in Europe at the time, and would go on to exert a strong influence on the development of the research university throughout the 19th century. Göttingen provided professors like Blumenbach with the academic freedom and the research facilities (including its preeminent library) necessary for innovative research, which in turn acted as the foundation for wielding scientific influence throughout Europe. As one of Göttingen’s most distinguished professors, Blumenbach commanded great authority as a scientist for several decades in the late 18th and early 19th centuries. His ties to Göttingen form a key aspect of Blumenbach’s historical significance because it anticipates the institutional integration of anthropology as a discipline in university departmental development. Blumenbach’s academic career stands out in contrast to the more idiosyncratic and auto-didactic stamp found in the biographies of natural historians of the 17th and 18th centuries. These historical figures tended to be associated with a scientific society or association, rather than a university. Göttingen and Blumenbach’s academic stature point to the future rise of the university as the primary center of scientific research.

Published in the same year as the American Declaration of Independence, his groundbreaking work De generis humani varietate nativa (later published in English as On the Natural Variety of Mankind), in many ways represents the ‘Copernican turn’ to modern scientific principles in the study of man. Arising from the European Enlightenment, it is a noteworthy coincidence that both of these groundbreaking works create a tense dynamic that would play a formative role in the development of the American republic in the 19th century, with the Declaration of Independence proclaiming the universal rights of all humanity on the one hand, and Blumenbach’s Natural Variety of Mankind laying the foundation for the scientific study of man on the other. The former document defines man in his nature as a freely acting moral agent, while the latter views him more deterministically as an object subject to the forces of nature. Though Blumenbach’s works themselves were not widely read in the early American republic, American academics such as Samuel George Morton interpreted and recast Blumenbach’s theories in a distinctly American context.  This scientific image of man would go on to form the basis of modern racial theory, and hence racism, thus colliding head-on with the declaration of universal human rights and creating the dynamic for much of modern world history.

All of the elements surrounding the social upheaval arising from this dynamic between the liberational impulse of universal human rights and the deterministic nature of science can be clearly delineated in Blumenbach’s life and times. Rather than modern anthropology beginning in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, as many historical studies have claimed, scholars are increasingly recognizing the value in focusing on the 18th century as the time when modern anthropology emerged. The process leading to this recognition has been a gradual one in the historiography of anthropology, with historians from the middle decades of the 20th century identifying the 18th-century Enlightenment as being an important step toward a ‘science of man’. This change runs counter to the view that the history of anthropology prior to Darwin be regarded as a ‘proto-anthropological’ period. Ongoing research has increasingly pointed to the need to revise this interpretation, to recognize that true origins of anthropology are to be traced back to the 18th century, and not the 20th.

From the late 18th century to the publication of Darwin’s On the Origin of Species, the stamp of Blumenbach’s work can be found in the thought of several generations of early anthropologists in the German-speaking states, Great Britain, France, the United States, and in several other countries in Europe. His ideas and methods were widely disseminated as a popular teacher in Göttingen, in his prolific and far-reaching network of written correspondence, and through his published works, several of which became standard texts and were translated in several languages. In his scientific approach to the study of man, he laid the intellectual and methodological foundations for the 19th century anthropologists who would later establish a formal disciplinary and institutional approach to anthropology.

Though recognized as a significant figure during his life, Blumenbach’s fame and influence waned in the latter half of the 19th century, and he was largely forgotten by the turn of the 20th century. This has little to do with Blumenbach’s importance to anthropology, but rather is more a reflection of the peculiarly difficult gestation and early development of the discipline itself. Though his name is duly noted in introductory anthropology texts, throughout the 20th century he was little known outside the circle of specialists on the German Enlightenment or historians of anthropology. In recent times his name frequently appears in studies on race and racism. He is generally regarded as being the first to develop a scientific concept of race as applied to humans, and of having developed the five major population groupings that has dominated racial thinking since the 18th century.

Unlike the founding ‘fathers’ in other scientific disciplines, it is a curious fact, indeed somewhat perplexing, that no full-length biography exists of Blumenbach. Regarding this lacunae as symptomatic of broader social and disciplinary forces relating to anthropology, an important part of this research Website is to look into why the acknowledged Father of Anthropology was virtually forgotten only a few decades after his death. He was regarded by his contemporaries as one of Europe’s greatest scientists of the 19th century, and the vestiges of this fame remain only in the frequently cited honorific as ‘father’ of the discipline. Both Blumenbach’s significance and his being forgotten are indeed central elements in the history of modern scientific anthropology.