Daniel Rutherford

Daniel Rutherford (1749 to 1819) was a Scottish physician, chemist and botanist, remembered above all for isolating nitrogen in 1772. His work belongs to the early period of pneumatic chemistry, when investigators were separating the component gases of air and learning that the part left after combustion and respiration would support neither flame nor animal life. Rutherford combined that laboratory interest with a medical career and with botany, so he stands among the physician-naturalists of the eighteenth century who moved between medicine, chemistry and the study of plants rather than keeping to one discipline. This entry rests on the short lead of the source article, which gives his dates, his nationality, his three fields and the isolation of nitrogen, and it claims nothing beyond that.