Karl von den Steinen

Karl von den Steinen (1855 to 1929) was a German physician trained in psychiatry who became the founder of South American ethnology. Born in Mülheim on the Ruhr, he studied medicine at Zürich, Bonn and Strasbourg, took his doctorate in 1875, worked in clinics in Berlin and Vienna and in 1878 became an assistant physician in the psychiatric department of the Berlin Charité. A world journey that began that year led him to the ethnologist Adolf Bastian, and in 1882 and 1883 he went as physician and naturalist with the German International Polar Year expedition to South Georgia. He then led two expeditions to the upper Xingu river in central Brazil in 1884 to 1885 and 1887, made first contact with the local peoples, and wrote a grammar of the Bakairi language. He later became a professor in Berlin, visited the Marquesas Islands in 1897 and wrote the standard work on Marquesan art. He died in Kronberg in the Taunus.