He is regarded as the founder of historical pathology.

He studied disease in relation to the history of man, made his study yield to men outside his own profession an important chapter in the history of civilisation, and even took into account physical phenomena upon the surface of the globe as often affecting the movement and character of epidemics.
The account of "The Black Death" here translated by Dr.Babington was Hecker's first important work of this kind.

It was published in 1832, and was followed in the same year by his account of "The Dancing Mania." The books here given are the two that first gave Hecker a wide reputation.

Many other such treatises followed, among them, in 1865, a treatise on the "Great Epidemics of the Middle Ages." Besides his "History of Medicine," which, in its second volume, reached into the fourteenth century, and all his smaller treatises, Hecker wrote a large number of articles in Encyclopaedias and Medical Journals.

Professor J.F.K.Hecker was, in a more interesting way, as busy as Professor A.F.
Hecker, his father, had been.