Jacobus Bontius

Jacobus Bontius, also known as Jacob de Bondt, was a Dutch physician and a pioneer of tropical medicine, born in Leiden in 1592 and dead at Batavia in the Dutch East Indies in 1631. He was the youngest of eight children of the physician Gerard de Bondt, a professor at Leiden, and he took his medical degree at Leiden in 1614. He sailed to the East Indies with Jan Pieterszoon Coen for the Dutch East India Company. His observations were published after his death as De medicina Indorum and include what is recognized as the first medical description of beriberi, along with a report on the dysentery epidemic in Java in 1628. His 1631 natural history of the East Indies introduced the Malay word orang hutan into European languages.