Family and Finances

In September and October 1742 the letters often dwell on the quarrel between the Haller and the Segner families. The enmity upset and saddened him, Teichmeyer wrote, but he would heed Haller’s advice and not meddle in the dispute. That promise did not keep him from soon wondering whether in a visit to Göttingen he might be able to restore peace. He grew ever more desperate in the wake of what Haller wrote him about the quarrel, even leading him to think that he (Haller) was considering leaving Göttingen. In his only surviving letter Haller declared that Segner’s wife tormented Haller’s wife with untrue remarks having to do with their deceased mother. At one point Teichmeyer thought that various professors in Göttingen might be asked to help restore peace between the quarreling families. Eventually he sent his youngest daughter to Göttingen to comfort Haller’s wife. Despite Teichmeyer’s repeated assurances that he loved and admired Haller, the latter apparently long felt that his father-in-law did not side with the Hallers in their dispute with the Segners.

Haller and his wife happened to be in Jena when Teichmeyer’s wife died, on 23 June 1742. Barely two months later, at the age of fifty-seven, Teichmeyer began to write in considerable detail about his search for a new spouse. He maintained that he would make sure that no marriage would lessen his children’s inheritance. The woman would have to bring with her at least 10,000 reichsthaler. In August it was widely presumed that the widow of a theology professor in Jena would become his wife, but she married a law professor. Then a well-to-do widow in Leipzig was recommended to him, but on going there he did not approve of her. In mid-October he announced that he was getting a wife, Anna Maria Neuber. He described her as the widow of a rich merchant, twenty-nine years old, childless, and with ample funds on hand and more to be collected (the latter he detailed). “Sie verlanget von mir nichts und bringet doch ein schones Vermogen ein,”

he summarized, while providing financial details of the prenuptial contract that they signed. Later he reported that he was seeing to it that her money would not lie idle, but would instead be lent out and accrue interest.

Haller’s finances, especially his mention in March 1742 of a 300-thaler debt in Hanover, worried Teichmeyer, who kept track of pecuniary details. He regularly remarked on his financial support for his children. Several times he sent sums of 50 or 100 thaler to both the Hallers and the Segners, and he asked that they send him receipts when they obtained the money: “ich lege alle scheine von meinen kinndern zusammen in ein kistgen so giebet es keine irrung.”

By early 1743 the gifts to the Hallers, he said, amounted to 400 thaler. On Haller’s wedding and on Teichmeyer’s birthday, Teichmeyer and his first wife gave alms to the poor so that they would pray for Amalia and Haller.

The messages Teichmeyer addressed to Amalia echoed some of the points in those to Haller, but mainly they stressed her duty to obey and please her husband. At various times he instructed her to manage a thrifty household, keep up her French, watch her health, look after her (step)children, not offend anyone, cultivate a garden, and rely on God. He recommended to her as potential friends several wives of Göttingen professors.

Teichmeyer doted on all of his children, including his only surviving son, whom he always called Justel and whose fate worried him. But in these letters he understandably showed a special concern for Amalia. When he learned in October 1743 that Haller planned to make a trip to Bern, he feared that he would have to take leave of her forever. To forestall her loss, he claimed that Haller could serve science better in Germany than in his fatherland. The final paragraph of his last available letter, he said he wrote on the verge of tears.

Professors and Physicians

Teichmeyer was alarmed when Haller wrote in March 1742, “[E]in fast unerträglicher verdruß nimbt mier fast allen muth.”

He demanded that his son-in-law state the reasons for his discouragment. Haller apparently mentioned what was neither the first nor the last quarrel with his colleague Brendel. Haller’s dispute with his former protégé and prosector Huber also disturbed Teichmeyer, not least since Huber had recently married the daughter of the Göttinger professor Gesner. Huber’s departure in fall 1742 to Giessen seemed to remove that source of conflict. In any case, Teichmeyer urged Haller not to take such troubles to heart.

Teichmeyer alluded to a princely commission that in late summer 1742 was looking into the University in Jena and causing anxiety among professors. Around that time he also complained about the regime’s ongoing censorship, “die uns noch drucket & alle buchdrucker zu bettler machet.”

After his visit to Leipzig in search of a wife, Teichmeyer reported on his meetings with many notable academics and officials. He mentioned in early September 1742 a current quarrel between two professors that resembled Haller’s with the ungrateful Huber.

Teichmeyer offered practical advice for Haller the professor. His Collegia would provide him little income in Göttingen; instead, he would have to rely mainly on his salary, medical practice, and promotions. His lectures, like Segner’s, were too learned; he would do well to lower his expectations of students, most of whom exhibited little curiosity.

In early 1743 Teichmeyer assured a skeptical Haller that he was a top contender for the professorship at Halle vacated by the death of Hoffmann. He advised him, however, to stay in Göttingen, where his situation was good. In the preceding fall Teichmeyer had wanted his son-in-law Darjes to obtain a professorial post in Göttingen so that all three of his daughters would live in the same town.

Teichmeyer often lavished praise on Haller’s medical and botanical publications, in particular his edition of Boerhaave’s lectures and his great work on Swiss plants. They would doubtless bolster his already considerable fame in the learned world.

Medical observations appear in the letters now and again, as when Teichmeyer wrote that he cured a man of a pleurisy and that sufferers of purple petechiae in Weimar came to him for treatment. As the author of a textbook on legal and forensic medicine, he reported on his involvement in a contested case of infanticide. He suggested remedies for Haller’s swollen feet after a serious illness. Not least, he gave his son-in-law advice on monitoring Amalia’s pregnancy.