Henry Bowman Brady

Henry Bowman Brady (born February 22, 1835 in Gateshead , England , † January 10, 1891 in Bournemouth ) was a British micropalaeontologist , pharmacist and botanist. Along with Alcide d'Orbigny and Joseph Cushman, he is considered one of the pioneers of foraminifera research.

Brady received like his brother George Stewardson Brady (1832-1921; later professor of natural history in Newcastle and an expert on ostracodes ) from his father, a doctor and surgeon who was also a passionate naturalist. The father was also a Quaker, and Brady attended Quaker schools until he was 15 and then worked as a chemist's assistant in Leeds for four years . He briefly studied pharmacy at Newcastle College of Medicine and established himself in Newcastle-upon-Tyne in 1855 as a pharmacist and businessman (trading in pharmaceuticals and scientific apparatus) . He achieved prosperity, so that he was able to retire from business life in 1876 and devoted himself entirely to foraminifera research, on which he had already published twenty essays and monographs by this time, some with scientists like William Benjamin Carpenter . He was a member of the Northumberland, Durham and Newcastle-upon-Tyne Natural History Society and the Tyneside Naturalists' Field Club.

He did research on both recent and fossil foraminifera (in 1876 he published a monograph on those from the Permian and Carboniferous). In their classification he fluctuated between that of Carpenter and that of August Emanuel von Reuss . From 1878 he began working on the foraminifera of the Challenger expedition , published in 1884. He made some of the drawings himself, otherwise he worked with the draftsman and lithographer AT Hollick. He made two trips around the world (India, China, Japan, Java, Pacific, Australia, New Zealand, USA) and traveled frequently to the USA from the 1870s onwards. He had good relations with Felix Karrer in Vienna and described the foraminifera of the Austro-Hungarian polar expedition in 1881. He received various prestigious awards from Vienna and Prague. On a trip he fell ill in Cairo in 1889 and tried to recover in the mild climate of Bournemouth , where he died in a severe winter of 1891.

As a pharmacist, he was also instrumental in organizing pharmacy in Great Britain. He was one of the founders of the British Pharmaceutical Conference, was its treasurer from 1864 to 1870 and its president from 1872/73. He has served on the Council of the Pharmaceutical Society and one of its examiners specifically for botany and has also lectured on botany at Durham College of Science. He was an honorary member of the American Pharmaceutical Association, the Philadelphia College of Pharmacy, and the Pharmaceutical Societies in Saint Petersburg and Vienna.

In 1874 he became a Fellow of the Royal Society . In 1881 he received an honorary doctorate in Aberdeen .

The Micropalaeontological Society's Brady Award is in honor of him and George Stewardson Brady.

Web links

• Biography of CG Adams at the Cushman Foundation