Franz Jacob von Melle

Franz Jacob von Melle (born March 20, 1696 in Lübeck ; † April 8, 1770 ibid) was a German physician and city ​​physician from Lübeck.

Life

Von Melle came from a family that had come to Lübeck from Westphalia at the end of the Middle Ages and had produced important pastors here over several generations. He was one of nine children of the chief pastor, seniors of the ecclesiastical ministry and polymath Jacob von Melle and his wife Dorothea (1664-1731), a daughter of Samuel Pomarius (1628-1683). The pastor Samuel Gerhard von Melle was his brother.

After visiting the Katharineum he studied human medicine , including since 1715 at the University of Altdorf where he in 1716 as a family album is occupied -Einträger and 1717 a disputation chaired by Johann Jakob Baier held and was founded in October 1718 at the University of Strasbourg for Dr. med. PhD. He then went on a Grand Tour that took him to Holland, England, France, Italy. In Rome he was from Pope Clement XI. received in his own audience and awarded a medal bearing the bust of the Pope. He returned to Lübeck and opened a very prestigious practice. In 1743 the city council appointed him city physician. In this position, with the supervision of the entire health system in the city and its rural area as well as forensic medicine tasks were connected, he remained until his death.

In 1762 the council appointed Hans Bernhard Ludwig Lembke as his assistant and in 1766 as the second Physicus with the right and the duty to succeed Melles.

At the end of his life, Franz Jacob von Melle had to live on alms and wrote in his memory book the bitter words if he had 10 sons, he would rather wish that they would all become a shoemaker than that one of them would go to the doctor in Lübeck.

estate

As the only surviving son Jacob von Melles, he inherited his father's rich collections, including an extensive and at the time famous collection of ethnographic objects from Iceland , Sweden , Finland , the Ottoman Empire and Japan . After his death in 1770, Johann Caspar Lindenberg acquired most of the collection for his art and natural history cabinet; his son Adolph Friedrich Lindenberg (1740-1824), consul general of the Hanseatic cities in Lisbon , added a significant number of other objects to the collection and decreed in his will that they should pass into the possession of the Society for the Promotion of Charitable Activities after his death . In 1831 his son and heir fulfilled this destiny. These collection items form the basis of the ethnographic collection of the Hanseatic City of Lübeck . Other pieces that had more of a Wunderkammer character are exhibited in the St. Anne's Museum today.

The Wellcome Library is keeping a letter from Franz Jacob von Melles dated 1734 to a Dr. Fencing over his wife's illness.

Works

• Adagiorum medicinalium sylloge quam sub praesidio Io. Iac. Baieri ... ad disputandum proponet Franciscus Iacobus a Melle. Lubecensis ... 1717. Altorfii Noric .: Literis Iod. Guil. Kohlesii 1717.
• Diss. Inaug. de fortuitis in medicina proficuis. Strasbourg 1718.

Digital copy , Bavarian State Library

literature

• Johann Georg Gesner : Life and merits of the noble, highly learned and highly experienced gentleman: Mr. Franz Jacob von Melle of the drug knowledge Doctors and highly deserved physicists of the healing. Rom. Reichsfreyen Stadt Lübeck compiled from printed and written articles and dedicated to the memory of this great and happy doctor on request. Green, Lübeck 1770.
• Johann Daniel Overbeck : Life story of Mr. D. Franz Jakob von Melle. 1770.

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Matr. Altd. II, 373
2. ^ The manuscripts of the Nuremberg City Library. Harrassowitz, Wiesbaden 1995, ISBN 3-447-03629-X , p. 504.
3. ↑ Lübeck: Festschrift that part takers of the 67th Assembly of German Natural Scientists and Physicians, dedicated by the doctor Lichen Association and the Natural History Society of Luebeck. Rahtgens, Lübeck 1895, p. 102
4. ↑ Catalog entry , accessed on August 5, 2014.