Hermann Conring

Hermann Conring was a German intellectual, born on 9 November 1606 in Norden in East Frisia and dead on 12 December 1681, who made significant contributions to the study of medicine, politics and law. The second youngest of ten children and descended from Lutheran clergy on both sides of his family, he began the philosophy curriculum at the University of Helmstedt at fourteen and spent most of his working life there as a professor in northern Germany. He first addressed medicine, producing important studies on the circulation of the blood, and later turned to politics. The scholar David Lindenfeld calls him a Neo-Aristotelian, because philosophy in his circles meant explaining law, religion and politics in terms laid down by ancient thinkers, above all Aristotle. In 1660 he was the first to lecture on Statistik, the forerunner of modern government statistics, though the subject was political science. His 1632 work De origine iuris Germanici, on the origin of German law, conclusively disproved the Lotharian legend that had been used to explain why Roman law was the law of the Holy Roman Empire.