Nathaniel Wallich

Nathaniel Wallich (1786 to 1854) was a surgeon and botanist of Danish origin who spent most of his working life in India. Born in Copenhagen, he trained at the Royal Academy of Surgeons and in 1806 was appointed surgeon to the Danish settlement at Serampore in Bengal. When the British took over the settlement he was briefly imprisoned, then released on parole because of his scholarship, and he later entered the service of the East India Company. He founded the museum of the Asiatic Society in Calcutta and served as its first curator, and from 1817 until 1846 he worked at the Royal Botanic Garden, Calcutta. There he built a catalogue of more than twenty thousand specimens, now known as the Wallich Catalogue, with a collection held at Kew, and published Tentamen Florae Nepalensis Illustratae and Plantae Asiaticae Rariores. He received an M.D. from Aberdeen in 1819, taught botany at Calcutta Medical College, and was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1828.