Johann Gottlob Leidenfrost - Personal Life and Career

Personal Life and Career

Johann Gottlob Leidenfrost was born on November 27, 1715 in Rosperwenda in the County of Stolberg-Stolberg. His father, Johann Heinrich Leidenfrost, was a well-known minister. Little is known of Leidenfrost's life prior to the start of his academic career.

Leidenfrost first attended the University of Gießen where he followed in his father's footsteps by studying theology. He soon switched his academic concentration to medicine, following that career path in his subsequent attendance at the University of Leipzig and the University of Halle.

In 1741 he was awarded a doctorate in medicine largely based on a well-received treatise on the study of the movement of the human body, entitled On the Harmonious Relationship of Movements in the Human Body. After the conclusion of his academic studies, Leidenfrost spent some years traveling and took a post as a field physician in the first Silesian War.

In 1743 Leidenfrost was offered and accepted a professorship at University of Duisburg. In 1745 he married a local Duisburg woman, Anna Cornelia Kalckhoff. Johann and Anna had seven children together, including Johanna Ulricke (1752–1819), who was later the wife of the noted German theologian, Christian Krafft. In addition to teaching medicine, physics and chemistry at the University of Duisburg, Leidenfrost also functioned as the university's rector, all the while maintaining a private medical practice.

In 1756, Leidenfrost became a member of the Berlin Academy of Sciences. During his lifetime, Leidenfrost published more than seventy manuscripts, including De Aquae Communis Nonnullis Qualitatibus Tractatus (1756) ("A Tract About Some Qualities of Common Water") in which the Leidenfrost effect was first described (although the phenomenon had been previously observed by Herman Boerhaave in 1732). Leidenfrost died on December 2, 1794 in Duisburg, exactly two hundred years to the day after Gerardus Mercator.