Johann Daniel Major

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Johann Daniel Major
Portrait relief in memory of Johann Daniel Major in the Bordesholm monastery church , attributed to Theodor Allers

Johann Daniel Major (born August 16, 1634 in Breslau , † August 23, 1693 in Stockholm ) was a German polymath .

Life

Born as the son of Elias Major (1587–1669), the rector of the Elisabet-Gymnasium in Breslau , he was a protégé of the famous Baroque poet Christian Hofmann von Hofmannswaldau . He initially studied medicine and physics at the University of Wittenberg and the University of Leipzig, and also studied art history and then went to the University of Padua , where he received his doctorate in medicine. After stints in Wittenberg and Hamburg, where he practiced as a plague doctor and made a name for himself, Major was appointed to the newly founded University of Kiel in 1665 at the age of 31 to teach medicine and botany. On May 24, 1664, he was admitted to the Academia Naturae Curiosorum , today's German Academy of Natural Scientists Leopoldina , with the academic surname Hesperus I ( Matriculation No. 29 ) .

Major quickly caused a stir because it was the first time he carried out public sections (on executed criminals) in northern Germany, and he set up a Hortus medicus , which should have been based on the garden of the University of Padua. In addition, Major was also active as a writer, so in 1670 he wrote a remarkable but now forgotten utopia called See-Farth for the New World without ship and sails , in which he described the realm of Cosmophorum , the ideal land of free science. Major was of the opinion that a good scholar must be well versed in all sciences; So he worked on sketches for aircraft, soon devoted himself as a polyhistor to archeology and built the public museum Cimbricum in Kiel . For the opening in 1688, Major had a commemorative medal minted and printed a museum guide. His writings on the principles of order in collections made Major one of the founders of museology alongside Samuel Quiccheberg .

A century before the research direction of archeology in the narrower sense was to be established, the Kiel professor opened several prehistoric burial mounds with the help of students and farmers whom the duke had assigned for this purpose and developed in his work Population Cimbrien (1692) the - Back then - sensational theory that the indigenous people of the Cimbrian Peninsula were descended from Noah's grandson Gomar and soon after the Tower of Babel had reached Jutland via Russia and Sweden. Although it had previously been believed that the Jutes and Cimbri could be traced back to Gomar, Major contradicted the prevailing view that the "natives" of Schleswig and Holstein had come across the Baltic Sea, and spoke with quite "modern" arguments in favor of the overland route out.

Major was determined to confirm this hypothesis through excavations, and therefore traveled to Sweden via Denmark in 1693; He is thus one of the earliest explorers in the modern sense. But he didn't get far; In Stockholm the famous doctor and scholar was asked to cure the fatally ill Queen Ulrike Eleonore . Major could not help the dying woman; worse, he infected himself and died just a week later. His body was to be transferred to Kiel and then buried like the remains of the other Kiel professors in the Bordesholmer monastery church, but the ship sank and Major found his grave in the Baltic Sea. His bust in a laurel wreath has been preserved.

literature

  • Horst Joachim Frank: Literature in Schleswig-Holstein. From the beginning to 1700 . Volume I, Neumünster 1995, pp. 558-563.
  • Wilhelm HessMajor, Johann Daniel . In: Allgemeine Deutsche Biographie (ADB). Volume 20, Duncker & Humblot, Leipzig 1884, p. 112.
  • Walther Killy : Literature Lexicon: Authors and works in the German language . (15 volumes). Bertelsmann-Lexikon-Verlag, Gütersloh / Munich 1988–1991 (CD-ROM: Berlin 1998).
  • Johann Daniel Ferdinand Neigebaur : History of the imperial Leopoldino-Carolinische German academy of natural scientists during the second century of its existence. Friedrich Frommann, Jena 1860, p. 190 .
  • Johannes Reinke: The oldest botanical garden in Kiel; documented representation of the establishment of a university institute in the seventeenth century. Kiel 1912 archive.org
  • Jan Schlürmann : Johannes Daniel Major and the first botanical garden of the Christian Albrechts University in Kiel . In: Christiana Albertina. Research and reports from the Christian-Albrechts-Universität zu Kiel , Issue 64 (2007), pp. 35–46.
  • Cornelius Steckner : The Museum Cimbricum from 1688 and the Cartesian "Perfection of the Mind" . In: A. Grote (Ed.), Macrocosmos in Microcosmo. The world in the room. On the history of collecting from 1450 to 1800 . Opladen 1994, pp. 603-628.
  • Major, Johann Daniel. In: Johann Heinrich Zedler : Large complete universal lexicon of all sciences and arts . Volume 19, Leipzig 1739, column 609 f.
  • Willi Ule : History of the Imperial Leopoldine-Carolinian German Academy of Natural Scientists during the years 1852–1887 . With a look back at the earlier times of its existence. In commission at Wilh. Engelmann in Leipzig, Halle 1889, supplements and additions to Neigebaur's history, p. 148 ( archive.org ).

Web links

Commons : Johann Daniel Major  - Collection of images, videos and audio files

supporting documents

  1. ^ Member entry by Johann Daniel Major at the German Academy of Natural Scientists Leopoldina , accessed on May 1, 2017.
  2. ^ Johann Daniel Major: See-Farth to the New World without ship and sails. Reumann, Kiel 1670. - Digitized in the digital library Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania
  3. Kunst-Topographie Schleswig-Holstein , 1969, p. 619