Johann Julius Walbaum

Johann Julius Walbaum (1724 to 1799) was a German physician and naturalist from Greifswald who also worked as a taxonomist of animals. As an ichthyologist he was the first to describe many fish species from distant waters, among them the great barracuda, the chum salmon from the Kamchatka River and a South American characin from the Sao Francisco River. In medicine he is noted as one of the first to see gloves as a protection against infection in surgery: as early as 1767 he used gloves made of sheep intestine for vaginal examinations. His large natural history collection became the basis of the Natural History Museum in Lubeck, which opened in 1893, though the collection was destroyed when Lubeck was bombed in the Second World War.