Petrus Camper - Surgeon's Guild

Surgeon's Guild

Starting in 1755, he resided in Amsterdam where he occupied a chair of anatomy and surgery at the Athenaeum Illustre, later completed by a medicine chair. He investigated inguinal hernia, patella and the best form of shoe. He withdrew five years later to dedicate himself to scientific research and lived on his property just outside Franeker. In 1762 he became politically active in Groningen, and a year later he chose to accept the chair of anatomy, surgery and botanics at the university there.

Both in Amsterdam and in later years, Camper kept a surgical clinic and showed selfmade drawings to illustrate his eloquent lectures, before retiring in 1773. His main focus of attention was for anatomy, zoology and his collection of minerals and fossils. Among his many works, he studied osteology of birds and discovered the presence of air in the inner cavities of birds' skeletons. He investigated the anatomy of eight orangutans, and claimed it was a different species from the human being, and not simply a "degenerate" type of (white) human, as some contemporary scientists theorized. Petrus Camper published memoirs on the hearing of fishes and the sound of frogs, and dissected an elephant, and a rhinoceros from Java. He studied the diseases of rinderpest and rabies.

• He was visited by Samuel Thomas von Sömmering, who later became a professor in Göttingen.
• He became an associate of the French Academy of Sciences and had a eulogy in his honour composed by Nicolas de Condorcet and Félix Vicq-d'Azyr.
• In 1776 he became involved in a plan of dike construction.
• In 1780 he took lessons from Étienne Maurice Falconet.
• In his ideas about art Camper was influenced by Johann Joachim Winckelmann.
• He made drawings of the Dolmen south of Groningen.
• He was in the selection committee for the prize contest for the design of the new townhall in Groningen that was later awarded to his friend Jacob Otten Husly, who he knew from his work for the Amsterdam Drawing Academy.
• He became one of the directors of the Admiralty of Friesland.
• He was appointed as an (Orangist) burgomaster of Workum in 1783, opposing the Patriots (faction).
• In September 1787 he became the president of the state council of the Dutch Republic and warmly welcomed the stattholder William V of Orange and his wife Wilhelmine of Prussia.
• At the end of life he suffered from pleuritis; Camper drank a good glass of champagne and died.