Göbbel Luminita, Schultka Rüdiger
Institut für Anatomie und Zellbiologie, Martin-Luther-Universität Halle-Wittenberg, Grosse Steinstrasse 52, D-06097 Halle, Saale.
Ann Anat. 2002 Nov;184(6):519-22. doi: 10.1016/s0940-9602(02)80091-7.
Although Johann Friedrich Meckel the Younger was one of the most famous anatomists, his research work has been severely neglected in the recent historiographical literature on the German morphology. The goal of our study is to approach a general characterization of his research program. Our analysis reveals that Meckel introduced the Cuvierian empiricism in Germany, but he also considered the "Abstraktion" as a main component of the scientific knowledge. According to his epistemology on nascent organisms and transmutable species, both, variability and relatedness of the organic forms are important to the same degree. Meckel explicitly adopted the Jean-Baptiste de Lamarcks (1744-1829) evolutionary theories. Even though in Meckel's discourse about diversity the Cuvierian notion of "functional adaptation" was preserved, the main goal of his research program was to demonstrate empirically the "Allgemeinheit des Bildungstypus". For this purpose, he considered the entire variety of the animal kingdom: normal as well as abnormal organisms, adult specimens and above all embryos. Moreover, he believed that the abnormal development is due to the same laws as the normal development. He applied parallelisms to a new domain, the study of malformation. With Meckel's researches on teratology, a new era in the analyses of the anomalies was opened. They became an integral part of the natural diversity and thus a highly exploited subject of biomedical researches. Meckel's empirical and epistemological writings on the embryology, comparative embryology, teratology, pathology, systematics and comparative anatomy have largely contributed to the foundation of the biological research.
尽管小约翰·弗里德里希·梅克尔是最著名的解剖学家之一，但在最近关于德国形态学的史学文献中，他的研究工作却被严重忽视了。我们研究的目的是对他的研究计划进行总体描述。我们的分析表明，梅克尔在德国引入了居维叶的经验主义，但他也将“抽象”视为科学知识的一个主要组成部分。根据他关于新生生物体和可变异物种的认识论，有机形态的变异性和关联性同等重要。梅克尔明确采纳了让 - 巴蒂斯特·拉马克（1744 - 1829）的进化理论。尽管在梅克尔关于多样性的论述中保留了居维叶的“功能适应”概念，但他研究计划的主要目标是通过实证证明“发育类型的普遍性”。为此，他考虑了动物王国的全部种类：正常和异常的生物体、成年标本，尤其是胚胎。此外，他认为异常发育与正常发育遵循相同的规律。他将平行论应用于一个新的领域——畸形学研究。随着梅克尔对畸形学的研究，异常分析开启了一个新时代。它们成为自然多样性的一个组成部分，因此也成为生物医学研究中被大量研究的对象。梅克尔关于胚胎学、比较胚胎学、畸形学、病理学、分类学和比较解剖学的经验主义和认识论著作在很大程度上为生物学研究奠定了基础。
