George Busk

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George Busk
Gravestone in Kensal Green Cemetery , London

George Busk (* 12. August 1807 in Saint Petersburg ; † 10. August 1886 in London ) was a British Marine - surgeon , zoologist and paleontologist .

Live and act

Busk was the son of the trader Robert Busk. He studied in London at both St Thomas' Hospital and St Bartholomew's Hospital . In 1832 he was appointed as an assistant surgeon at Greenwich Hospital in London.

As a naval doctor, he first served on the HMS Grampus , later for many years on the HMS Dreadnought , which had already participated in the Battle of Trafalgar . In Busk's time the ship was used by the Seamen's Hospital Society as a hospital ship for former members of the merchant navy or the fishing fleet and their relatives. During this period, Busk made important observations regarding cholera and scurvy .

In 1855 Busk withdrew from the service and settled in London, where he devoted himself mainly to the study of zoology and paleontology. As early as 1842 he was involved in the publication of the Microscopical Journal ; later he was co-editor of the scientific journals Quarterly Journal of Microscopical Science (1853-1868) and Natural History Review (1861-1865).

From 1856 to 1859, Busk held the position of Hunterian Professor of Comparative Anatomy and Physiology at the Royal College of Surgeons of England and became President of the College in 1871. He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1850 and was an active member of the Linnean Society , the Geological Society and President of the Anthropological Institute (1873-1874). Busk received the Royal Medal of the Royal Society, the Wollaston Medal of the Geological Society in 1885, and the Lyell Medal in 1878 .

Busk was the leading authority on the polyzoa ; later he dealt with the remains of vertebrates from caves and river deposits. He died in London in 1886 and is buried in Kensal Green Cemetery , London.

Busk is still known today, especially among paleoanthropologists , because in 1864 he published a description of a Neanderthal skull discovered in 1848 and classified it correctly. This skull from the Forbes' Quarry limestone quarry in Gibraltar (archive name: Gibraltar 1 ) was more completely preserved than that of the eponymous fossil Neandertal 1 from near Düsseldorf , discovered in 1856, but resembled it so much that Busk took the Gibraltar skull as the second , independent evidence - attributed to the same species , Homo neanderthalensis . In addition, he translated the description of the find of the eponymous Neanderthal from German into English and was instrumental in making it known outside of Germany.

literature

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ George Busk: Pithecoid Priscan Man from Gibraltar. In: The Reader. July 23, 1864.
  2. ^ Hermann Schaaffhausen : To the knowledge of the oldest racial skulls. In: Archives for Anatomy, Physiology and Scientific Medicine. 1858, pp. 453-478.
  3. ^ Georg Busk: On the Crania of the most Ancient Races of Man. In: The Natural History Review. Volume 1, No. 1, 1861, pp. 155-176, ( babel.hathitrust.org full text).
personal data
SURNAME Busk, George
BRIEF DESCRIPTION British surgeon, zoologist and paleontologist
DATE OF BIRTH August 12, 1807
PLACE OF BIRTH St. Petersburg
DATE OF DEATH August 10, 1886
Place of death London