Patrick Russell (herpetologist)

Patrick Russell (1726 to 1805) was a Scottish surgeon and naturalist who worked in the Levant and India and is called the Father of Indian Ophiology. Born in Edinburgh, he took his medical degree in 1750 and joined his half-brother Alexander Russell in Aleppo, where he succeeded him as physician to the Levant Company factory and studied plague outbreaks and the local practice of inoculating children against smallpox. Back in London he became a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1777. In 1781 he went to India, was named naturalist to the East India Company in the Carnatic, studied snakebite, tested supposed remedies on animals and tried to give people a way to tell venomous snakes from harmless ones. His An Account of Indian Serpents Collected on the Coast of Coromandel appeared from 1796, and Russell's viper is named after him.