Johann Christian Senckenberg

Johann Christian Senckenberg (1707 to 1772) was a German physician, naturalist and collector from Frankfurt am Main. The son of the city's chief medical officer, he studied medicine at Halle, practised in Frankfurt without a licence for some years, and took his doctorate at Göttingen in 1737 under Albrecht von Haller with a dissertation on the healing power of the berries of the lily of the valley. He later served as Physicus extraordinarius and, from 1755, as Physicus ordinarius for the health service in Frankfurt. His deep religious commitment and his contact with the charitable institutions of August Hermann Francke at Halle shaped his later philanthropy. In 1763 he established the Senckenberg Foundation to support the natural sciences, which led to the botanical garden of the Frankfurt university, and his name lives on in the Senckenberg Natural History Society, the university library and the Naturmuseum Senckenberg.