Linnaeus

This modern biography of the famous 18th century Swedish Botanist incorporates the Linnaeus research of the last decades. At the same time, through the use of the scientist’s autobiography and quotations from his letters, it presents a vivid contemporaneous portrait. Heinz Goerke divides his book into two parts. The first is a detailed narrative of Linnaeus’s life. Here is a genuinely successful effort to treat Linnaeus as a human being. The author paints him for what he was – a man living in reality, with all the trials of his own nature, including vanity, egotism, an depression, and yet with the determination to finish what he believed to be an almost divinely appointed task. The second part of the text, beginning with a sketch of the organization of nature as understood before Linnaeus, develops the great botanist’s approach to the problems of classification and nomenclature and shows some of the solutions Linnaeus proposed. Here there is a discussion of Linnaeus’s botanical and zoological activities and an extensive and fresh treatment of him as physician – material that is not found in accounts written by authors unacquainted with medicine.

Text: English, German (translation)