Background
He was the only son of medical historian Justus Hecker (1795–1850).
Obstetrician university professor
He was the only son of medical historian Justus Hecker (1795–1850).
He studied medicine at the Universities of Berlin, Heidelberg, Paris and Vienna, receiving his doctorate in 1848 from Berlin.
In 1851 he became an assistant at the clinic of obstetrics at the Berlin-Charité under Dietrich Wilhelm Heinrich Busch (since 1788). Here he gained his habilitation in 1853 with a thesis involving retroverted gravid uterus (De retroversione uteri gravidi). In he was an associate professor of obstetrics at the University of Marburg, and during the following year accepted an appointment as a gynecologist at the University of Munich.
At Munich he was also director of the municipal district maternity hospital and school for midwives.
In 1874/75 he served as university rector. From 1877 he worked with Carl Siegmund Franz Crede (1819–1892) and Alfred Hegar (1830–1914) for the creation of an independent gynecological society, but it wasn"t until 1885, three years after his death, when the Deutsche Gesellschaft für Gynäkologie was established.
Hecker was a son-in-law to politician Johann Caspar Bluntschli (1808–1881).