Felix Ritter von Luschan was an Austrian doctor, anthropologist, explorer, archaeologist and ethnographer.
Life
Luschan was born the son of a lawyer in Hollabrunn, Lower Austria, and attended the Akademisches Gymnasium in Vienna. After leaving school he studied medicine at the University of Vienna and anthropology in Paris, with an emphasis on craniometry. After he gained his doctorate in 1878, he was an army doctor in Austro-Hungarian occupied Bosnia and, together with the British archaeologist Arthur Evans, travelled through Dalmatia, Montenegro and Albania. From 1880 he worked as a medical assistant at the Vienna General Hospital and a lecturer at the University of Vienna in 1882. In 1885 he married Emma von Hochstetter, daughter of the German geologist Ferdinand von Hochstetter, a close friend of his father. On 1 January 1886 Luschan took up a position as an assistant to Director Adolf Bastian at the Königliches Museum für Völkerkunde in Berlin, where upon Bastian's death in 1905 he became Director of the Africa and Oceania Department. In this capacity he acquired one of the most important collections of Benin antiquities, ivory carvings, and bronze figures, details of which he published in his multivolume magnum opus. for classifying skin color. It was reported that for areas with no data Biasutti simply filled in the map by extrapolation from findings obtained in other areas. He started his academic career in 1888, in 1904 was appointed Reader, and in 1909 gave up his duties at the Völkerkundemuseum when he was appointed tenured professor at the Berlin Charité medical school. In 1911 he became the holder of the first chair of anthropology at Berlin's Frederick William University. He is also remembered for creating the von Luschan's chromatic scale for classifying skin colour, which consisted of 36 opaque glass tiles which were compared to the subject's skin. Though Luschan had joined the German Society for Racial Hygiene in 1908, in his works he rejected the rising ideas of "scientific racism" and stressed the equality of the human races. He died in Berlin at the age of 69 and is buried at his summer residence in Millstatt, Austria. The German Society for Racial Hygiene goal was "for society to return to a healthy and blooming, strong and beautiful life" as Ploetz put it. The Nordic race was supposed to regain its "purity" through selective reproduction and sterilization. In 1915 he was appointed to the "Königlich Preußische Phonographische Kommission" for his anthropological expertise. The purpose of the commission was to record the approximately 250 languages spoken by the prisoners of German WWI PoW camps. In the course of this endeavor, von Luschan also conducted physical anthropology research on the internees.
