Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition/Tiedemann, Friedrich

TIEDEMANN, Friedrich (1781—1861), German anatomist and physiologist, the son of a philosopher and psychologist of considerable repute, was born at Cassel on 23d August 1781. He graduated in medicine at Marburg in 1804, but soon abandoned practice owing to disappointment at his failure to check his father's last illness. Repelled on the one hand by the brilliant but unsubstantial discourses of Schelling on the "Naturphilosophie," and attracted on the other hand by the practical skill and intelligence of the surgical anatomist Sömmering, he returned to the study of natural science. He betook himself to Paris, and became an ardent follower of Cuvier. On his return to Germany he maintained the claims of patient and sober anatomical research against the prevalent speculations of the school of Oken (see Oken and Morphology), whose foremost antagonist he was long reckoned. His manifold labours in the field of Cuvierian anatomy cannot be recorded here; but his remarkable studies of the development of the human brain, as correlated with his father's studies on the development of intelligence, may be mentioned. He spent most of his life (from 1816) as professor of anatomy and physiology at Heidelberg, and died at Munich on 22d January 1861.