Carl Gustav Carus

Carl Gustav Carus (1789–1869) is considered one of the most important physicians of the Romantic era in medicine. After studying medicine in Leipzig and subsequently working as a Privatdozent (PD), he was appointed in 1814 as director of the Royal Maternity Hospital and professor of obstetrics at what would later become the Surgical-Medical Academy in Dresden. From 1827 onward, he served as personal physician to the Saxon royal family. His scientific work focused, among other things, on anatomy, embryology, comparative natural history, psychology, and natural philosophy. He was also active as a painter and was associated with Johann Wolfgang von Goethe and Caspar David Friedrich.

Scholars generally assess his body of work as broad in scope, without attributing to him a lasting, defining role in any single field. His contemporary reputation and historical legacy are based primarily on his ability to bridge different fields of knowledge and practice, through which he embodied the 19th-century ideal of the polymath.

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As part of a comprehensive research project, the Institute of History of Medicine has shed new light on Carl Gustav Carus and his role in the history of racial theory. This has resulted in three articles published in leading journals of the history of medicine. The first study analyzes Carus’s radical polygenist theory of race in the context of Romantic medicine and 19th-century scientific racism. It becomes clear that Carus—unlike contemporaries such as Blumenbach or Tiedemann—assumed insurmountable “race-specific” differences and based his views closely on the racist American School of Ethnology. The second paper focuses on the material dimension of these theories: for the first time, the provenance of over 300 skull and cast specimens from Carus’s collection—which are now stored in Leipzig and Dresden—has been partially investigated. The reconstruction of his Europe-wide network shows how Carus disseminated his theories through exchanges with the anatomical elite, but was ultimately excluded from the founding moment of German-language anthropology. The third contribution examines the enduring legacy of Carus’s image, particularly in the GDR: Despite his problematic racial theory, Carus was long honored as a universal genius and the namesake of the Dresden Medical Academy, while a critical examination of his work did not begin until much later. Today, there is growing debate over whether Carus, given his racist views, is a suitable role model for Dresden’s medical community.

In the summer semester of 2023, an elective course was offered that took an in-depth look at Carl Gustav Carus’s racial theory as well as the debate surrounding the naming of the University Hospital. The central learning objective was to enable students to critically reflect on Carus’s writings on race and to support them in developing an informed stance on the renaming debate. In addition to an introduction to the general aspects of Carus’s racial theory, the Institute also addressed the material dimension of his work—in particular, his craniological and chirognomic collection. The elective course concluded with an academic essay in which students were asked to develop a critical position on a topic of their own choosing related to Carus’s racial theory. Since the summer of 2023, the topic of Carus, racial theory, and anthropology has been firmly integrated into the Institute’s core curriculum, where it is covered in greater detail as part of the interdisciplinary area GTE.