Johannes Seidl

Physicians and their contribution to the early history of earth sciences in Austria

Abstract The propaedeutic character of academic studies at philosophical faculties of the Habsburg Monarchy during the ‘Vormärz’-period, 1815–1848, prevented research-oriented scientific training at the universities. In 1849 the minister of education Leo Thun-Hohenstein initiated a comprehensive educational reform. The crucial improvement in the system of higher education was that the old Austrian philosophical faculties were transformed into genuine research faculties, thus facilitating scientific studies on a more progressive level. Before this fundamental reform, natural science subjects were offered only at the medical faculty at which the substantial scientific subjects, for example chemistry and natural history, were taught. Pioneers in Austrian geology therefore earned a medical degree before they changed to geology, a science in which they had to be autodidacts. Among these ‘pioneers’ were the famous bohemian balneologist Franz Ambros Reuss (1761–1830), his son August Emanuel Reuss (1811–1873), professor of mineralogy at the Universities of Prague (1849–1863) and Vienna (1863–1873), and Carl Ferdinand Peters (1825–1881), the first professor of mineralogy and geology at Graz University (1864–1881). Members of the succeeding generation include Conrad Clemens Clar (1844–1904) and Theodor Posewitz (1851–1917). These were all outstanding individuals with unique skills and expertise, successfully combining medical and earth sciences in their everyday lives.

Ami Boué (1794–1881), géoscientifique du XIXe siècle

Abstract Born on 16 March 1794 in Hamburg as a son of a Huguenot family whose members made big fortune as ship-owners, Ami Boue took his doctor’s degree in medicine in 1817 at the University of Edinburgh. During the following years, he completed his knowledge in the field of natural sciences, especially in Geoscience. In 1830, after having founded, with other scientists, among whom Constant Prevost and Gerard-Paul Deshayes, the Geological Society of France, in which Boue became the first president, he left Paris in 1835 and settled in Vienna. In 1836, 1837 and 1838 he crossed the Balkans. In his masterpiece La Turquie d’Europe (Paris, 1840, four volumes), he published the results of this research. In his study, Ami Boue intended to join the Austrian empire with Turkey by railways. Anyway, Boue’s works concerning the Balkans were fundamental for the future generations of Austrian geoscientists.