Petrus Camper (1722–1789)

Abstract

THE Faculty of Medicine of the University of Groningen, in collaboration with the Netherlands Journal of Medicine and the Netherlands Society for the History of Mathematical and Natural Sciences, will commemorate in April next the one hundred and fiftieth anniversary of the death of Petrus Camper, physician, anatomist, obstetrician and artist. The name of Camper is perhaps now most frequently recalled in connexion with his contributions to the foundation of craniology as a scientific study. He was the first to make use of the facial angle—an invention apparently of the artist Dürer—as a factor in racial discrimination. The occasion is not without special interest to science in Great Britain, as it was during Camper's visit to London in 1748, through his association with Pringle, Mead and Pitcairn, and his familiarity with the collections of Sir Hans Sloane, Collinson and others that his interest in natural history was stimulated, if not actually aroused. Camper was born on May 11, 1722, at Leyden, where he was educated and took his degree in philosophy and medicine in 1746. He afterwards held professorial chairs at Franeker (1750), Amsterdam (1755) and Groningen (1763), being appointed councillor of State in 1787, two years before his death in 1789. He was among the most distinguished men of science of international standing of his day. Not only was he a fellow of the Royal Society of London, but also he shared with Boerhaave the then unique honour for a foreigner of membership of the Paris Academy of Sciences. His works, of which a collected edition was published in Paris in 1803, covered a wide field, ranging from the physical education of children to detailed studies in anatomy, physiology and natural history. Among his anthropological treatises were studies of the origin and colour of negroes, and on the variation of the facial angle in different races.