Elias Lönnrot

Elias Lönnrot (1802 to 1884) was a Finnish medical doctor, philosopher, poet, musician, linguist, journalist, philologist and collector of traditional Finnish oral poetry. Born in Sammatti, he enrolled at the Academy of Turku in 1822 to study medicine, and the university was moved to Helsinki after the Great Fire of Turku. He is best known for synthesizing the Finnish national epic, the Kalevala, from short ballads and lyric poems that he gathered during field expeditions in Finland, Russian Karelia, the Kola Peninsula and the Baltic countries. In botany he is remembered as the author of the 1860 Flora Fennica, the first scientific text written in Finnish rather than in Latin. This is the medical facet of a person whose main fame is literary; this entry is not medical advice.