Johann Joseph Dömling

Johann Joseph Dömling (13 January 1771 – 7 March 1803) was a German physician, pauper's doctor and professor of physiology at the University of Würzburg.

He was the son of a farmer who was unable to afford further education himself, but as a gifted student, his studies were supported by the prince-bishop Franz Ludwig von Erthal.

His textbook, considered part of a transition from anatomy-based physiology to one based on organic function, also contains the earliest reference to the endogenous presence of carbon monoxide in human blood.

Dömling was born in Merkershausen [de] on 13 January 1771, near Bad Königshofen im Grabfeld, Prince-Bishopric of Würzburg (now part of Bavaria).

However, the new prince-bishop, Georg Karl Ignaz von Fechenbach zu Laudenbach, continued to support him financially and so he was able to finish his studies in Würzburg.

[5] His medical thesis was Dissertatio inauguralis sistens morborum gastricorum acutorum pathologiam ('Inaugural dissertation on the pathology of acute gastric diseases') and his advisor was Carl Caspar von Siebold.

Other stages of his journey were Prague, Dresden, Leipzig, Jena (where he met the Romantic philosophers Johann Gottlieb Fichte and Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling) and Berlin.

[6][1] After the 1798 death of Georg Christoph von Siebold [sv], Dömling succeeded him as professor of physiology in Würzburg on 20 August 1799.

[15] Dömling originally supported a mechanistic physiology,[1] a theory going back to Descartes that viewed the body as a mechanical system of pipes and pumps.

[21] The historian of life sciences, Joan Steigerwald, describes Dömling's textbook as part of a transition from anatomy-based physiology to one based on organic functions.