Johann Gerhard König

Johann Gerhard König (29 November 1728 – 26 June 1785) was a Baltic German botanist and physician who served in the Tranquebar Mission, India before joining service under the Nawab of Arcot, and then the English East India Company. He collected natural history specimens including plants, particularly those of medical interest, from the region and several species are named after him including the curry tree (Murraya koenigii).

Biography

König was born near Kreutzburg in Polish Livonia, which is now Krustpils in Latvia.[1] He was a private pupil of Carl Linnaeus in 1757, and lived in Denmark from 1759 to 1767 during which time he examined the plants of Iceland. In 1767 he joined as a medical officer to the Tranquebar Mission and on his voyage to India, he passed through Cape Town where he met Governor Rijk Tulbagh with an introduction from Linnaeus, collecting plants in the Table Mountain region from 1 to 28 April 1768. König replaced the position made available following the death of Halle-educated physician Samuel Benjamin Cnoll (1705–67).[2][3] In 1774 he took up a better paying position as naturalist for the Nawab of Arcot, serving in that position until 1778.[4][5][6] In 1773, he received the Doctor's degree in absentia from the University of Copenhagen possibly for his studies on indigenous remedies published as De remediorum indigenorum ad morbes cuivis regioni endemicos expuguandos efficacia. He became naturalist to the Nawab of Arcot in 1774 and embarked on a trip to the mountains north of Madras and to Ceylon, a description of which was later published in a Danish scientific journal. On 17 July 1778, König was appointed Naturalist at Madras with the British East India Company where he remained until his death, undertaking several scientific journeys and working with notable scientists like William Roxburgh, Johan Christian Fabricius and Sir Joseph Banks.

König followed the example of the Moravian South-Asian Mission in Tranquebar in collecting and trading natural history objects on a large scale.[3] His engagement in natural history encouraged missionaries like Christoph Samuel John, Johan Peter Rottler and the mission doctor Johann Gottfried Klein of the Tranquebar Mission to follow this path. The mission doctor of the Moravian South-Asian Mission, Benjamin Heyne, also followed the example of König and was appointed Naturalist of the British East India Company in 1793.[7] Most plants of König and his successors were sent back to Europe and described by A.J. Retzius, Roth, Schrader, Willdenow, Martin Vahl and James Edward Smith.[8] Only Rottler published his own descriptions.[9]

König made several visits around the region and perhaps the most notable of his journeys was to Siam and the Malacca Straits in 1778–80, in this period he spent several months studying the flora and fauna in Phuket.[10] He met Patrick Russell who arrived in India in 1782 at Tranquebar and the two remained in constant communication. He made trips to the hills near Vellore and Ambur and in 1776 a trip to the Nagori hills with George Campbell. In 1784, he visited Russell at Vizagapatnam on his way to Calcutta. On the way he suffered from dysentery and Roxburgh who was at Samalkota oversaw his treatment. He however did not recover and died at Jagannadhapuram, Kakinada in 1785. He bequeathed his papers to Sir Joseph Banks.[5][11]

He described many plants used in Indian Medicine and kept notes on other aspects of natural history including the termites of southern India[12] and the collection and use of their alates as food.[13] Koenig's collections of insects from southern India may have been used in descriptions by Fabricius.[14]

The plant genus Koenigia was named for him by Linnaeus, as was a species of curry-leaf tree Murraya koenigii.

References
  1. Various sources give his birthplace as Ungernhof (a.k.a. Lemenen), a manor belonging to the estate of Kreutzburg/Krustpils. Krustpils, which is on the north bank of the Daugava, is now part of the city of Jēkabpils, which was then Jakobstadt in Courland on the south bank. Rao (1998) places his birth in "Lenaenen in Courland (Denmark)" - that, however, being clearly erroneous
  2. Jensen, Niklas Thode (2005-10-01). "The Medical Skills of the Malabar Doctors in Tranquebar, India, as Recorded by Surgeon T L F Folly, 1798". Medical History. 49 (4): 489–515. doi:10.1017/S0025727300009170. ISSN 0025-7273. PMC 1251641. PMID 16562332.
  3. Ruhland, Thomas (2021), Jensz, Felicity; Petterson, Christina (eds.), "The "United Brethren" and Johann Gerhard König: Cranz's History of Greenland as an Avenue to the Natural History of India", Legacies of David Cranz's 'Historie von Grönland' (1765), Christianities in the Trans-Atlantic World, Cham: Springer International Publishing, pp. 209–237, doi:10.1007/978-3-030-63998-3_10, ISBN 978-3-030-63997-6, S2CID 234318467, retrieved 2022-06-06
  4. Rottbøll, Christen Friis (1783). Beskrivelse af nogle Planter fra de malabariske Kyster, Til Pisoniæ buxifoliæ Beskrivelse, som Side 537 endes, følger følgende Oplysning, som et nyelig med Skibet Tranquebar fra Ostindien af Hr. Dr. Kønig mig tilsendt Exemplar [Description of some Plants from the Malabar Coasts ...]. Proceedings of the Royal Danish Academy of Sciences and Letters (in Danish).
  5. Rao, B S Subba (1998) History of Entomology in India. Institution of Agricultural Technologists.
  6. Hagen, H.A. (1862). Bibliotheca entomologica. Die Litteratur über das ganze Gebiet der Entomologie, bis zum Jahre 1862. Vol. 1. p. 428.
  7. Thomas Ruhland (2018). Pietistische Konkurrenz und Naturgeschichte. Die Südasienmission der Herrnhuter Brüdergemeine und die Dänisch-Englisch-Hallesche Mission (1755-1802). Herrnhut. pp. 282, 375-382
  8. Stewart, Ralph R. (1982). "Missionaries and clergymen as botanists in India and Pakistan" (PDF). Taxon. 31 (1): 57–64. doi:10.2307/1220590. hdl:2027.42/149715. JSTOR 1220590.
  9. King, George (1899). "A Sketch of the History of Indian Botany". Report of the 69th meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science. Vol. 69. pp. 904–919.
  10. Gerolamo Emilio Gerini (1905). "Historical Retrospect of Junkceylon Island" (PDF). Journal of the Siam Society: 32–41.
  11. MacGregor, Arthur (2018). "European Enlightenment in India: an Episode of Anglo-German Collaboration in the Natural Sciences on the Coromandel Coast, Late 1700s–Early 1800s". Naturalists in the Field: Collecting, Recording and Preserving the Natural World from the Fifteenth to the Twenty-First Century. BRILL. pp. 365–392. doi:10.1163/9789004323841_014. ISBN 978-90-04-32384-1.
  12. König, Johann Gerhard (1779). Beschäftigungen der Berlinischen Gesellschaft Naturforschender Freunde. 4: 1–28 https://www.biodiversitylibrary.org/page/41342653. {{cite journal}}: Missing or empty |title= (help)
  13. Fletcher, T.B. (1921). "Koenig's paper on South Indian termites". Proceedings of the Fourth Entomological Meeting. Calcutta; Superintendent government printing, India. pp. 312-333.
  14. Dover, Cedric (1922). "Entomology in India". The Calcutta Review. 3 (2): 336–349.
  15. International Plant Names Index.  J.Koenig.

Further reading
  • Sterll, M (2008). "Life and adventures of Johann Gerhard König (1728–1785), a phantom of the herbaria". Rheedea. 18: 111–129.
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