author
Johann Christoph Pohl
1705–1780
An 18th-century Leipzig physician and scholar, he is now best remembered for a striking Latin dissertation on so-called vampires. His work sits at the curious meeting point of early medicine, folklore, and Enlightenment-era debate.
1 Audiobook
Dissertationem de hominibvs post mortem sangvisvgis, vvlgo sic dictis Vampyren
by Johann Christoph Pohl, Johann Gottlob Hertel
About the author
Born in Lobendau in Silesia on June 22, 1706, Johann Christoph Pohl was a German physician who built his career in Leipzig. He studied at the University of Leipzig, earned his doctorate there in 1734, and later became a professor of medicine.
Pohl's surviving reputation today often rests on a remarkable academic work about the undead: a Latin dissertation on people believed to suck blood after death, commonly described as vampires. That unusual subject makes him especially memorable to modern readers, but it also reflects the wider scholarly world he lived in, where medicine, popular belief, and natural philosophy often overlapped.
He died in Leipzig on August 26, 1780. Reliable biographical sources confirm him mainly as a physician and university scholar, so many details of his personal life remain faint; still, his name endures because one of his works captures an especially strange and fascinating corner of 18th-century thought.