Carl Peter Thunberg : botanist and physician : career-building across the oceans in the eighteenth century

Resource Information

The work Carl Peter Thunberg : botanist and physician : career-building across the oceans in the eighteenth century represents a distinct intellectual or artistic creation found in European University Institute. This resource is a combination of several types including: Work, Language Material, Books.

Label

Carl Peter Thunberg : botanist and physician : career-building across the oceans in the eighteenth century

Title remainder

botanist and physician : career-building across the oceans in the eighteenth century

Statement of responsibility

Marie-Christine Skuncke

Creator

• Skuncke, Marie-Christine

Subject

• Botanists -- Japan -- History
• Botanists -- Sweden -- History
• Botany -- Japan -- History
• Botany -- Sweden -- History
• Thunberg, Carl Peter, 1743-1828

Language

eng

Summary

The Swedish botanist and physician Carl Peter Thunberg, a pupil of Linnaeus, was the only European scientist who visited and published his observations of Tokugawa Japan in the eighteenth century. On his way to and from Japan, he visited territories in the Dutch colonial empire: the Cape Colony, Batavia (present- day Jakarta), and Ceylon (Sri Lanka). Following his return to Sweden, he made a spectacular career at the University of Uppsala. He published a ground-breaking work on Japanese plants, Flora Japonica (1784), and a travel account that was translated into several languages. In 1787 the Swedish king Gustav III, on Thunberg's initiative, founded a new Botanical Garden and a monumental building for natural history ✹ Linneanum, now the home of the Swedish Collegium for Advanced Study (SCAS) ✹ as a gift to the university. Marie-Christine Skuncke reconstructs Thunberg's scientific career by exploring exchanges within the networks which he built in Europe, the Dutch colonies, and Tokugawa Japan. Drawing on a wide range of sources, this book is a study of social practices in natural history, in a global perspective.--

Assigning source

Provided by Publisher

Cataloging source

DLC

Illustrations

• illustrations
• facsimiles

Index

no index present

Literary form

non fiction