HALLER, ALBRECHT VON (1 708-17 7 7 ), Swiss anato mist and physiologist, was born at Berne on Oct. 16, 1708. Pre vented by ill-health from joining in sports, he developed an amaz ing precocity. He studied medicine at Tubingen under Camera rius, and then at Leyden under Boerhaave and Albinus, graduating in 1727 with a thesis that proved the so-called salivary duct, claimed as a recent discovery by Coschwitz, to be merely a blood vessel. After visiting London, Oxford and Paris, in 1728 he went to Basle where the awakening of his interests in botany led him to begin a collection of plants which was afterwards the basis of his great work on Swiss flora. About the same time he wrote his poem Die Alpen, describing the charm of the simple and idyllic life of the Alpine inhabitants. It was included in the first edition of his Gedichte (1732).
In 173o von Haller began to practise as a physician in Berne, but the fame of his botanical and anatomical researches led George II., in 1736, to offer him the chair of medicine, anatomy, surgery botany in the newly-founded university of Gottingen, a chair which he held for I 7 years, conducting at the same time a monthly journal (the Gottingisc/ie gelehrte Anzeiger), to which he is said to have contributed some I2,000 articles on almost every branch of knowledge. In 1753 von Haller resigned his chair and re turned to Berne, where, during the remaining 21 years of his life, which were largely occupied with various municipal and State duties, he prepared his Bibliotheca medica, the botanical, surgical and anatomical parts of which he lived to complete, wrote three philosophical romances—Usong (17 7 , Alfred (17 73) and Fabius and Cato (1774), expounding his views on various types of gov ernment, and produced, among other medical works, the justly famed Elementa physiologiae corporis humani (1757-6o). Von Haller died on Dec. Among von Haller's most important contributions to medicine may be named his recognition of the mechanism of respiration and the automatism of the heart, his admission of the use of bile in the digestion of fat, his descriptions of the development of the embryo, his work on the anatomy of the organs of generation, of the brain, of the heart and of many imperfectly-known arteries, and above all his classification of the bodily parts as sensible and insensible, irritable and non-irritable, together with his note worthy demonstration that sensibility and irritability are inde pendent, the former being a property of tissues endowed with nerves, the latter a peculiarity of all muscular tissue, independent of the nerves proceeding to it and surviving in severed parts.