The Correspondent

Hermann Friedrich Teichmeyer was born on 30 April 1685 in Münden (Hanover), where his father was town physician. Young Teichmeyer began medical studies at Leipzig in 1702 and continued them at Jena, earning the M.D. in 1708. He then combined practice with teaching as a privatdozent at Jena, until 1717, when he became professor of experimental physics. Two years later he also obtained an extraordinary professorship in medicine and in 1727 assumed the ordinary professorship of botany, surgery, and anatomy. In 1729 Duke Ernst August of Saxe-Weimar-Eisenach created him Hofrat and Leibmedicus. He was made a member of the Berlin Akademie der Wissenschaften in 1725 and of the Leopoldina in 1731.

In 1705 he married Marianne Sophie Schelhas, the daughter of Jena’s mayor. They had eleven daughters and two sons. At the time of her death, however, in June 1742, only three daughters and one son were still alive. The daughters Mariane, Amalia, and Wilhelmine were by then married to Professors Segner, Haller, and Darjes, respectively. Late in 1742 Teichmeyer married Anna Maria Neuber, the well-to-do widow of a merchant. She bore him a daughter he did not live to see, for he had died several weeks earlier, on 5 February 1744, the final day of his fifth prorectorate, never having been ill before.