Dissection for nursing students.

Biology as a discipline per se and its agenda, seems not to have been burdened from its beginnings as heavily with neo-Platonism as its subspecialty morphology, conceptualized at the same time by Goethe and Burdach. One of the reasons may have been that biologists were then regarded as "mere" naturalists, "doing" anatomy and embryology, breeding, and field work (as did Darwin, Wallace, Bateson and a legion of others during the 19th century), whereas the, perhaps more elitist, morphologists, ab initio devoted themselves to the origin, even to the Kantian analysis of causes of development and its variability within and between species. Since Goethe included abnormal plant development in his studies, his definition of morphology as the science of the form, formation and transformation of living organisms may be modified to include the concept of malformation, although the embryological and comparative analysis of vertebrate/mammalian malformation had its real inception somewhat later with the younger Meckel. In view of the meaning attached by his French contemporaries to the term transformisme (eventually defined as evolution) one would err considering Goethe as a prophet of "descent;" he was not, referring primarily to the continuous state of flux of living beings. Nonetheless, Goethe and Burdach independently coined the concept of morphology and set its agenda, increasingly freed of Naturphilosophie, an agenda that dominated 19th century biology but which did not come to fruition in its causal analysis of form and its formation until the 20th century, after Mendel, Darwin and the pioneers of experimental embryology (a.o., Roux, Driesch, Spemann, Vogt). In his discovery of the intermaxillary bone in humans (Goethe's bone), he had a startling insight, against conventional wisdom, into the anatomical, hence developmental, similarity of primate/mammals. During his lifetime, this was still called analogie by his great French contemporary Etienne Geoffroy St-Hilaire who actually meant what Owen later called homology which became one of Darwin's most powerful arguments for descent. A case of a pearl found by a blind chicken? Definitely not; Goethe had his nose far too close to the ground to have missed any of the major intellectual trends in the "life-sciences" in the late 18th/early 19th century; but, he was too much of an amateur to have had the kind of insights of grand plans granted to von Baer, Mendel and Darwin.

Anatomy↗

PubMed2004

A re-evaluation of the premaxillary bone in humans.

The discovery of the premaxillary bone (os incisivum, os intermaxillare or premaxilla) in humans has been attributed to Goethe, and it has also been named os Goethei. However, Broussonet (1779) and Vicq d'Azyr (1780) came to the same result with different methods. The first anatomists described this medial part of the upper jaw as a separate bone in the vertebrate skull, and, as we know, Coiter (1573) was the first to present an illustration of the sutura incisiva in the human. This fact, and furthermore its development from three parts:-(1) the alveolar part with the facial process, (2) the palatine process, and (3) the processus Stenonianus-can no longer be found in modern textbooks of developmental biology. At the end of the nineteenth and in the early twentieth century a vehement discussion focused on the number and position of its ossification centers and its sutures. Therefore, it is hard to believe that the elaborate work of the old embryologists is ignored and that the existence of a premaxillary bone in humans is even denied by many authors. Therefore this re-evaluation was done to demonstrate the early development of the premaxillary bone using the reconstructions of Felber (1919), Jarmer (1922) and data from our own observations on SEM micrographs and serial sections from 16 mm embryo to 68 mm fetus. Ossification of a separate premaxilla was first observed in a 16 mm embryo. We agree with Jarmer (1922), Peter (1924), and Shepherd and McCarthy (1955) that it develops from three anlagen, which are, however, not fully separated. The predominant sutura incisiva (rudimentarily seen on the facial side in a prematurely born child) and a shorter sutura intraincisiva argue in this sense. The later growth of this bone and its processes establish an important structure in the middle of the facial skull. Its architecture fits well with the functional test of others. We also focused on the relation of the developing premaxilla to the forming nasal septum moving from ventral to dorsal and the intercalation of the vomer. Thus the premaxilla acts as a stabilizing element within the facial skeleton comparable with the keystone of a Roman arch. Furthermore, the significance of the premaxillary anlage for the closure of the palatine was documented by a synopsis made from a stage 16, 10.2 mm GL embryo to a 49 mm GL fetus. Finally the growth of the premaxilla is closely related to the development of the human face. Abnormal growth may be correlated to characteristic malformations such as protrusion, closed bite and prognathism. Concerning the relation of the premaxillary bone to cleft lip and palate we agree with others that the position of the clefts is not always identical with the incisive suture. This is proved by the double anlagen of an upper-outer incisor in a 55 mm fetus and an adult.

Anatomy↗