Wilhelm Homberg

Wilhelm Homberg (born January 8, 1652 in Batavia, today Jakarta , † September 24, 1715 in Paris ) was a German naturalist .

Life

Coming from a Quedlinburg family, Homberg came to Europe as a teenager and studied law in Jena and Leipzig . In 1674 he settled as a lawyer in Magdeburg , occupied himself with botany , astronomy and physics and finally gave up his profession to go on study trips through Italy , France , Holland and England . Returned to Quedlinburg, he was in 1676 at the University of Wittenberg Dr. med. doctorate, traveled Germany and Scandinavia and visited mines in Saxony , Bohemia , Hungary and Sweden . Homberg became counselor to the royal personal physician Urban Hjaerne in Stockholm and in 1682 accepted Colbert's offer to settle in France. From 1685 he had a successful practice in Rome for several years , was considered one of the most important scholars of his time after his return to Paris and was accepted into the Académie Royale des Sciences in 1691 . Homberg entered the service of Duke Philip II of Orléans in 1702 and in 1705 became his personal physician and one of the three pensioners of the Académie Royale des Sciences who represented chemistry. He published in the "Mémoires" of the Académie articles on botany, zoology , medicine , physics and chemistry as well as general considerations in his Essais de Chimie (1702-09).

Homberg discovered "Homberg's phosphorus" ( calcium chloride ) and boric acid .

literature

• Dictionnaire des sciences médicales. Biography médicale. Volume 5, Panckoucke, Paris 1822. pp. 276–278 (digitized version )
• Johann Christian Poggendorff : Biographical-literary concise dictionary of the exact natural sciences . Barth, Leipzig 1863, p. 1134 f. ( Digitized version )
• Ernst Julius Gurlt and August Hirsch . Biographical lexicon of the outstanding doctors of all times and peoples. Volume III, Urban & Schwarzenberg, Vienna and Leipzig 1886, p. 268 (digitized version)
• Grete Ronge:  Homberg, Wilhelm. In: New German Biography (NDB). Volume 9, Duncker & Humblot, Berlin 1972, ISBN 3-428-00190-7 , p. 585 f. ( Digitized version ).
• Rémi Franckowiak, Luc Peterschmitt, "La chimie de Homberg: une vérité certaine dans une physique contestable", Early Science and Medicine 10/1 (2005): 65-90.