It is very common that university texts and courses in Biomechanics begin with a historical introduction to this science. In this presentation, the ancient indian text Śrīmad Bhāgavata Mahā Purāṇa and the Edwin Smith Papyrus, the only surviving copy of a portion of an ancient surgical text are often mentioned, as well as a large number of people who, over many centuries, have been fundamental for the conformation of this science. This group includes Aristotle, the anonymous Chinese author of the Nei Jing, Archimedes, Galen of Pergamon, Ibn Sina (Avicenna), Leonardo Da Vinci, Vesalius, Galileo, Harvey, Descartes, Borelli, Hooke, Newton. Also the Weber brothers, Muybridge, Jules Marey, Nikolai Bernstein, Vsévolod Meyerhold ¹ , and some others in recent times, such as Jacquelin Perry (1918 - 2013) and Judith Burnfield. (Fung, 1993, pp. 2-15; Winter, 2009, p. 1; Abu-Faraj et al., 2015, pp. 2-16; Steinmetz and Benzel, 2016, pp. 1-35; Whiting, p. 2018, 184).

In this context, the current historiography assigns the origin of the term “Biomechanics” to Dr. Moriz Benedikt, who mentioned it in Über Mathematische Morphologie und Biomechanik, within the framework of the Congress of Naturalists in Wiesbaden (Germany), in 1887. However, as Georg Toepfer shows (2011, p. 391), this term was previously used by the physiologist William Preyer.

The purpose of the work is to present the contributions provided by Preyer for the conformation of Biomechanics as a discipline of the scientific field. To carry out this work, 30 scientific publications have been analyzed, including books and journals published between 1820 and 1912, mainly about Physiology, Anatomy and Human Morphology. The books and articles analyzed were written in German, English, French and/or Spanish languages. Among them there are nine written by W. Preyer and eight by M. Benedikt.

William Thierry Preyer (4 July 1841 - 15 July 1897), also called Wilhelm, was born in Rusholme, England. He studied in Germany, where later on developed his professional career as a Professor of Physiology at the University of Jena. His work in the fields of Child Psychology and Physiology were substantial and some of its contributions are related to human development based on empirical observation and experimentation (Preyer, 1866; 1882; 1885). Philosophically, Preyer is considered a monist who held the idea of “eternal life”, a conception of the existence of the organic life in the Universe as eternal (Haeckel, 1909, pp. 106-107). In other words, he considered that life has always existed throughout the Universe, as can be read in the following Spanish translation of his Hypothesen über den Ursprung des Lebens (1875) [Hypotheses concerning the origin of life ]:

La que sí merece prelacion sobre todas las otras teorías, es la que hemos expuesto de la eternidad del movimiento vital, que crece y decrece con el calor del cuerpo movido, y del comienzo temporal de lo inorgánico como producto de anteriores procesos de metamorfósis material de los cuerpos cósmicos (Preyer, 1876b, p. 251) ² . [The one that deserves precedence over all other theories is the one that we have exposed of the eternity of vital movement, which grows and decreases with the heat of the moved body, and the temporary beginning of the inorganic as a product of previous processes of material metamorphosis of cosmic bodies ] (Preyer, 1876b).

Years later, the Russian Biochemist Alexandr Ivánovich Oparin, opposing the claim that “All organisms invariably originate from other living organisms” (Oparin, 1952, p. 34), will affirm that:

While the vitalists believe in the existence of a vital force, the mechanists consider that such a vital force does not exist. Moreover, the later consider inanimate and living organisms regulated by the same physicochemical physiology. In the midst of this dispute and controversies between vitalists, mechanists and monists, the term that we know as “Biomechanics” would have been coined in Germany.

The terms “Biostatik” ³ and “Biodynamik” were already used in the field of Physiology in 1866, as can be seen in Ernst Heinrich Haeckel´s diagram (Fig. 1). There is also evidence from previous authors such as Kraus (1820); Dunglison (1848) and Walser (1850), from whose work we have extracted the following quote:

These types of words that contain the prefix “Bio” were already used in the first half of the 19th century to relate Biology to Physics. However, as far as we have been able to verify, the term “Biomechanik” appears for the first time in Über die Erforschung des Lebens, a publication written by William Preyer and “Ausgegeben Anfang Januar 1873” [Published early January 1873 ] (Fig. 2).

After the preface (Vorwort), towards the end of the fourth page, we can find only one mention of the term ‘Biomechanics’ that appears in this book, where it can be read in German language that:

This sentence, surrounded by mystery, surely expresses the author’s conception that life has existed eternally (Preyer, 1875, p. 75; 1876a, p. 350; 1876b, p. 251), as he summed up in the well-known aphorism “Omne vivum e vivo” [All life comes from life ] (Preyer, 1883, p. 92) ⁵ . In simple words, according to his strong conviction, life cannot be explained by Mechanics exclusively, neither without it. ⁶

Ten years after the first published mention, Preyer locates the term Biomechanics in the introduction (Einleitung) of Elemente der Allgemeinen Physiologie (1883), when he refers to the application of physical principles to the phenomena of life, relating the concepts Biokinetik, Biostatik and Biodynamik:

Just a year later, in the French translation with the title of Éléments de Physiologie Générale (1884), similar words can be read:

When looking at the first two mention of the word Biomechanics, we will notice quite an important change in the way the word limits its own scope and relates to other disciplines. While in the first mention, Preyer emphasize the limitation regarding the knowledge about natural phenomena, in the second, he gives it a special place next to other scientific disciplines.

Therefore, there is visible a transformation from a limited and isolated concept to a more articulated one.

It is interesting to note that at present time, Biostatics and Biodynamics are disciplinary fields subsumed to Biomechanics, just as Statics and Dynamics are branches of Mechanics, exactly as it was for W. Preyer in the late 1800. However, currently Statics is a particular field of Dynamics and they are subordinated in different hierarchical level. However, special attention needs to be considered in the interpretation of the concept “Biomechanics” as we understand it today. First, Preyer considers Biomechanics with Biokinetics alike, with not much distinction within each other, and secondly, it is important to discriminate that the concept of “movement” did not have exactly the same meaning in the Physiology at that time, than in current Biomechanics.

Although the term was first used by Dr. Preyer (1873), referring to the general “science” of movement (1883), it will have to wait until Dr. Moriz Benedikt (1887) begins to assign the value to express a new science in an epistemologically broad sense. It is due to employment and resignification were given by Benedikt that the term “Biomechanik” spreads, expands and begins to have the importance that we assign to it today (Muñoz, 2017, p. 58; 2019, p. 117). ⁸

As a secondary result of our lengthy research, in 2016 we found that Kraniometrie und Kephalometrie (1888) could be the first textbook that specifically addresses Biomechanics as a new object of knowledge. Although this text consists of a succession of lectures held by Benedikt at the Wiener Allgemeine Poliklinik, its final structure is not reduced to a simple accumulation of lectures, as his author expressly indicates:

In his Multilingual Database (2008), Georg Toepfer publishes what would be, to date, the first mention of the term Biomechanik given by W. Preyer. However, the sentence containing this word appeared incomplete: “Die Biomechanik unternimmt es [… ] keineswegs alle Mysterien des Lebens zu entschleiern” [Biomechanics [… ] does not claim to reveal all mysteries of life ]. Based on a bibliographic research, as a main result, we found an edition of Über die Erforschung des Lebens (1873) where this first quote can be read completely, and that we have already presented (Fig.3).

We understand that this work will have a positive influence when presenting the History of Biomechanics in courses and university textbooks. As consequence, will result in a greater and more precise knowledge of the origins of this discipline by students, teachers and researchers.

In 1873, Preyer uses the term Biomechanik without any introduction, without giving it the proper status of a new concept, or an old one that he has renamed. Furthermore, as the author expresses in the Preface, dated October 28, 1872, he had presented the contents of the book at a conference a few months earlier:

For these reasons, it seems clear that the term Biomechanics was written in 1872, and that this was probably not the first time that Preyer or other scientists have mentioned it. The search for the term in other documents is open to interested researchers.

Finally, it also remains to be clarified if Moriz Benedikt was truly unaware that the term Biomechanik had already been introduced by W. Preyer. In favor of this hypothesis, considering that Benedikt lived in Austria while Preyer lived in Germany, and although they shared a common language, the distances and communication channels that separated them were considerable for that time. To this is added that, until today, there are no known complaints or criticisms from Preyer or his peers in this regard. On the contrary, it could be argued that it is difficult to assume that Benedikt was unaware of Preyer’s Physiology text, very relevant at the time, or that he had never heard about it from a colleague. Perhaps the Congress of 1872 can shed some light on these questions (Fig. 4).