Carl-Herman Hjortsjö

Not to be confused with Carl Hjortsjö, Swedish dentist.

Carl-Herman Hjortsjö (8 December 1914 – 3 July 1978), born Carl-Herman Hirschlaff, was a Swedish anatomist, physician and physical anthropologist, whose contributions to historical osteology were influential in its establishment as an academic field in the country.

Hjortsjö was born in Malmö, Sweden, as the son of practicing physician Herold Hirschlaff and Ester, née Sandstedt. He obtained a license to practice medicine in Lund, Sweden, in 1942; Gaston Backman and Carl Magnus Fürst, the country's well-known anatomists at the time, taught him at Lund University's Department of Anatomy. Hjortsjö became a Doctor of Medicine in 1945. The morphogenesis of epithelial pulmonal primordium in the cat was the subject of his dissertation.

In 1948, after studying the human liver, Hjortsjö made major contributions to the understanding of liver surgery and the transplantation technique that later emerged. He was the first to demonstrate the segmental division of the liver. Hjortsjö conducted a physical anthropological investigation of the Luttra Woman, a Neolithic bog body discovered in 1943, with archeologist Karl Esaias Sahlström and osteologist and zoologist Nils-Gustaf Gejvall; the result, including a detailed description of the remains, was published in 1952.

In 1969, Hjortsjö devised the first system to taxonomize human facial movements by their appearances on the face, along with a description of each change in appearance caused by the action of each facial muscle. American psychologists Paul Ekman and Wallace Friesen later in 1978 formalized the descriptions as the Facial Action Coding System.