Carolus Linnaeus (23 May 1707-10 January 1778) was a Swedish scientist who laid the foundation of modern scheme of Taxonomy. As a boy Linnaeus was to be groomed to be a churchman as his father & maternal grandfather were, but he showed little interest in the profession.
On the other hand he showed a deep love for plants & fascination with their names from a very early age. This disappointed his parents, but they were consoled when he entered the University of Lund in 1727 to study medicine.
A year later, he transferred to the University of Uppsala, the most prestigious university in Sweden. However, its medical facilities had been neglected & had fallen into disrepair. Most of Linaeus’s time at Uppsala was spent collecting & studying plants, his true love. During this time Linnaeus became convinced that in the stamens & pistils of flowers lay the basis for the classification of plants, & he wrote a short work on the subject that earned him the postion of adjunct professor. In 1732, the Academy of Sciences at Uppsala financed his expedition to explore Lapland, then virtually unknown. The result of this was the Flora Laponica published in 1737.
Linnaeus went to the Netherlands in 1735, promptly finished his medical degree at the University of Harderwijk, & then enrolled in the University of Leiden for further studies. That same year, he published the 1st edition of his classification of living things, the Systema Naturae, which grew from a slim pamphlet to a multi-volume work, as his concepts were modified & as more & more plant & animal specimens were sent to him from every corner of the globe.
Linnaeus was also deeply involved with ways to make the Swedish economy more self-sufficient & less dependent on foreign trade, either by acclimatizing valuable plants to grow in Sweden, or by finding native substitutes. Unfortunately, Linnaeus’s attempts to grow cacao, coffee, tea, bananas, rice, & mulberries proved unsuccessful in Sweden’s cold climate. His attempts to boost the economy (and to prevent the famines that still struck Sweden at the time) by finding native Swedish plants that could be used as tea, coffee, flour, & fodder were also not generally successful. He still found time to practice medicine, eventually becoming personal physician to the Swedish royal family.
In 1758, he bought the manor estate of Hammarby, outside Uppsala, where he built a small museum for his extensive personal collections. In 1761, he was granted nobility, & became Carl von Linné. Lingering on for several years after suffering what was probably a series of mild strokes in 1774, he died in 1778.
