John Vaughan Thompson

John Vaughan Thompson, about 1835

John Vaughan Thompson (born November 19, 1779 in Brooklyn , † January 21, 1847 in Sydney ) was a British doctor, zoologist and botanist.

Live and act

John Vaugham Thompson was the son of John Thompson and his wife Jane (née Hall) from the English town of Berwick-upon-Tweed , on the border with Scotland. His father was a Freeman of Berwick and a captain in the English army. As such, he fought in the American Revolutionary War and was temporarily adjutant to John Vaughan , after whom he chose the middle name of his son, who was born on Long Island during the war. The Thompsons had received lands in America for his service in the army, so the family had relocated there. After the defeat of the English, the property was lost and they returned to England. The Thompson couple had six children, John Vaughan being the youngest. His mother Jane died in Berwick in April 1782. Nothing else is known about his childhood.

John studied medicine at the University of Edinburgh from 1797 to 1799, among others with the anatomist Alexander Monro II , the naturalist John Walker and his successor Robert Jameson . He left the university without a degree, but received a position as an assistant doctor in a militia regiment. As assistant surgeon, he accompanied a regiment of the army to Gibraltar in 1799 and from there to the West Indies, where they fought against the Dutch in the Napoleonic Wars. In 1803 he was promoted to surgeon, still in military service. In 1806, on home leave in Berwick, he took over the position of Freeman from his late father. He published a Flora from Berwick and became an associate of the naturalistic Linnean Society of London . In 1809 he initially resigned from military service.

From 1812 to 1816 he worked, again as a military doctor, in Mauritius and Madagascar, just partly conquered by the French. In addition to his medical work, he worked as a natural scientist and a kind of administrative clerk. He introduced a smallpox vaccination, freed slaves in some regions and settled disputes among the indigenous population. He also published a paper on the indigenous and cultivated plant species on the island, some of which he introduced, such as improved varieties of sugar cane. After England returned Mauritius and Madagascar to France after the end of the Napoleonic Wars , he returned to England in 1816, also because of malaria.

In 1816 he became a district doctor in Cork . Here, in addition to his medical work, he resumed his natural research. Although he published almost his entire life, his importance as a naturalist is based on his research during this time. He was particularly interested in the plankton in the elongated bay of Cork. Thompson was the first to systematically use a plankton network for exploration. One of his discoveries was that barnacles did not belong to the molluscs, as previously thought, but to the crustaceans. He described the diverse larval forms of marine crustaceans, which until then had hardly been known due to their planktonic way of life. So he discovered that Zoea is not a genus of crabs, as previously thought, but a widespread form of larvae. Thompson published most of his discoveries not in widely circulating journals, but in private writings with small editions, which he called memoirs. Much of his research results were therefore little known during his lifetime, and Thompson was permanently in financial difficulties because of the small number of subscribers. His findings on the crustacean larvae were also initially contested by famous researchers such as Henri Milne Edwards and John Obadiah Westwood , who could not believe that the crustaceans, like the insects, also undergo a metamorphosis . Through his research on planktonic larvae, Thompson was able to clear up some other old riddles, such as the fact that the zoophytes , which had been a mystery until then, were not transitional forms to plants, but undoubtedly animals. By discovering the larvae of the previously enigmatic Sacculina parasite , he proved that it was also a cancer.

In 1817, Thompson married Martha Solomon, a Cork girl born in 1800. The couple had six surviving children, all born in Cork. He emigrated to Australia with his family. There he became vice inspector general for the hospitals in 1830. Since his salary was halved due to austerity measures in 1832, he did not get any further zoological research. At the end of 1832 his wife Martha died, so that as a widower he had to look after the six children alone. He now returned to Cork first. In 1835 he married his second wife, Deborah Cox from Devon. In the same year he entered the military again and in 1835 took a better paid job as an inspector in the English colonial army and for the convicts in Australia. His attempts to get a land credit from the English government to replace his father's losses in America were rejected. The family (without the two youngest daughters) returned to Australia, where they settled in Sydney in 1836. His work as a medical administrator was marked by friction and arguments with his subordinates, who saw their own prestige at risk due to his new position. Except for one position on the board of directors of the Australian Museum, no natural history research or activities in Australia have come down to us. In 1844 he had to retire for health reasons. He died at his Sydney home on January 21, 1847, aged 67.

Honors

The plant genus Thompsonia R.Br. is named after him. from the passion flower family (Passifloraceae) and Vaughania S.Moore from the legume family (Fabaceae).

Works (selection)

• A catalog of plants growing in the vicinity of Berwick upon Tweed . 1807
• A catalog of exotic plants cultivated in the Mauritius ... 1816

literature

• Ilse Jahn: history of biology . 3rd revised and expanded edition, Spektrum, Heidelberg [u. a.] 2000, ISBN 3-8274-1023-1
• David M. Damkaer: John Vaughan Thompson (1779-1847), Pioneer Planktonologist: A Life Renewed. Journal of Crustacean Biology 36 (2), 2016: 256-262. doi: 10.1163 / 1937240X-00002409

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Lotte Burkhardt: Directory of eponymous plant names - Extended Edition. Part I and II. Botanic Garden and Botanical Museum Berlin , Freie Universität Berlin , Berlin 2018, ISBN 978-3-946292-26-5 doi: 10.3372 / epolist2018 .
2. ↑ ^{a b} Walter Erhardt among others: The great pikeperch. Encyclopedia of Plant Names . Volume 2, page 2064. Verlag Eugen Ulmer, Stuttgart 2008. ISBN 978-3-8001-5406-7

Web links

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