Carus, Karl Gustav (1789-1869), German physiologist and psychologist, distinguished also as an art critic and a landscape painter, was born and educated at Leipzig. After a course in chemistry, he began the systematic study of medicine and in 1811 became a Privat docent. On the subject which he selected (comparative anatomy) no lectures had previously been given at Leipzig, and Carus soon established a reputation as a medical teacher. In the war of 1813 he was director of the military hospital at Pfaffendorf, near Leipzig, and in 1814 professor to the new medical college at Dresden, where he spent the remainder of his life. He was made royal physician in 1827, and a privy councillor in 1862. He died on the 28th of July 1869. In philosophy Carus belonged to the school of Schelling, and his works are thoroughly impregnated with the spirit of that system. He regarded inherited tendency as a proof that the cell has a certain psychic life, and pointed out that individual differences are less marked in the lower than in the higher organisms. Of his many works the most important are:—Grundzuge der vergleichenden Anatomic und Physiologie (Dresden, 1828); System der Physiologie (2nd ed., 1847-1849); Psyche: zur Entwickelungsgeschichte der Seele (1846, 3rd ed. Stuttgart, 1860); Physis, zur Geschichte des leiblichen Lebens (Stuttgart, 1851); Natur und Idee (Vienna, 1861); Symbolik des menschlichen Gestalts (Leipz., 1853, 2nd ed., 1857); Atlas der Kranioskopie (2nd ed. Leipz., 1864); Vergleichende Psychologie (Vienna, 1866).
See his autobiography, Lebenserinnerungen und Denkwurdigkeiten (4 vols., 1865-1866); K. von Reichenbach, Odische Erwiederungen an die Herren Professoren Fortlage ... und Hofrath Carus (1856). His England und Schottland im Jahre 1844 was translated by S.C. Davison (1846).
