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Sir John Richardson (1787-1865)
Section of the exhibition 'Some Surgeon Naturalists' on Sir John Richardson
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Sir John Richardson was a naval surgeon, trained at the Royal College of Surgeons of Edinburgh, who was offered the post of surgeon-naturalist-mineralogist on Sir John Franklin’s first expedition to delineate the unexplored northern coast of Canada. This expedition was extremely arduous with the members existing for several weeks on lichen, which Richardson said was extremely nauseous and produced bowel complaints. Undeterred by this Richardson volunteered to join Franklin’s second expedition to the northern Canadian coast, from 1824-27. On his return he wrote his major work Fauna Borealis Americana, or the Natural History of the Arctic Regions, part of which is shown here. He did not join Franklin’s ill-fated third expedition but did sail on one of the subsequent search expeditions. He spent most of his working life as Senior Physician at the Haslar Naval Hospital in Gosport.
Strix cinerea, from Volume 2 of William Swainson and John Richardson’s Zoology of the Northern parts of British America (1831)
