Josef Hyrtl (7 December 1810 – 17 July 1894) was an Austrian anatomist. His work in German, including the publication of Lehrbuch der Anatomie des Menschen in 1846, which was considered the German equivalent of Gray's Anatomy.
Personal life
Hyrtl was born at Kismarton, Hungary (now Eisenstadt, Austria). His father was a musician in the orchestra of Count Esterhazy in Austria. Hyrtl had another large collection of skulls, attributed to persons from Europe and the Caucasus region in an attempt to show significant differences in cranial features among individuals classified as white. This work was done to dispute the phrenologists at the time, who claimed certain cranial features were indicative of intelligence and personality. Today, 139 skulls from his collection are on display at the Mutter Museum in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.
In 1880 there was a magnificent celebration of Hyrtl's seventieth birthday, when messages of congratulation were sent to him from all the universities of the world. After retiring from his professorship he continued to do good work, his last publication being on Arabic and Hebraic elements in anatomy. On the morning of 17 July 1894, he was found dead in bed at his estate near Vienna.
Career
Hyrtl studied medicine at the University of Vienna from 1831 to 1835. In 1833, while he was still a student, he was named prosector in anatomy, and the preparations which this position required him to make for teaching purposes attracted the attention of professors as well as students. There he completed his well-known textbook of human anatomy, which went through some twenty editions and has been translated into several languages. The chair of anatomy at the University of Vienna fell vacant in 1845. While satisfied with the opportunities for work in Prague, he applied for the appointment of chair at the insistence of close friends. He would go on to serve as Chair of the Department of anatomy at University of Vienna for 30 years.
His monograph for the reform of anatomical terminology Onomatologia Anatomica (Vienna, 1880), attracted widespread attention.