Johan Andreas (Anders) Murray (27 January 1740 – 22 May 1791) was a Swedish physician of German descent and botanist, who published a major work on plant-derived medicines.
Biography
Johan Anders Murray was born in Stockholm on 27 January 1740, son of the Prussian-born preacher and theologian Andreas Murray (1695 - 1771).
His brothers were the professors Johann Philipp Murray (1726-1776) and Adolph Murray (1751-1803),
and the Bishop Gustaf Murray (1747-1825).
Murray studied from 1756-1759 in
Uppsala
Uppsala (, or all ending in , ; archaically spelled ''Upsala'') is the county seat of Uppsala County and the List of urban areas in Sweden by population, fourth-largest city in Sweden, after Stockholm, Gothenburg, and Malmö. It had 177,074 inha ...
, where he was taught by
Carl Linnaeus
Carl Linnaeus (; 23 May 1707 – 10 January 1778), also known after his ennoblement in 1761 as Carl von Linné Blunt (2004), p. 171. (), was a Swedish botanist, zoologist, taxonomist, and physician who formalised binomial nomenclature, the ...
. In 1760, he went to
Göttingen
Göttingen (, , ; nds, Chöttingen) is a college town, university city in Lower Saxony, central Germany, the Capital (political), capital of Göttingen (district), the eponymous district. The River Leine runs through it. At the end of 2019, t ...
, where he became a doctor of medicine in 1763. In 1769, he was appointed professor and director of the botanical garden.
He led investigations into the properties of medicinal plants, at that time the main interest of botanists, and into the ways in which plant-derived medicines could be prepared and administered.
In 1791, Murray was elected a member of the
American Philosophical Society
The American Philosophical Society (APS), founded in 1743 in Philadelphia, is a scholarly organization that promotes knowledge in the sciences and humanities through research, professional meetings, publications, library resources, and communit ...
. Murray died in Göttingen on 22 May 1791.
Work
Murray was a prominent pharmacologist and botanist. His work ' (1776–92) in six volumes, of which the last was published only after his death, is a comprehensive compilation of herbal remedies. Its full title is ', meaning ‘The Formulation of Medicines as Simple as Prepared and Arranged in Practice and Careful Aid’.
In addition, he published German translations of numerous writings by Swedish physicians.
In 1774 he published the 13th edition of Linnaeus's ' under the title ' (‘System of the Vegetable Kingdom’), with an introduction he wrote himself called ' (‘The Vegetable Kingdom’). The standard botanical abbreviation for this is Syst. Veg.. A fourteenth edition was published in 1784.
Legacy
The citrus genus ''
Murraya
''Murraya'' () is a genus of flowering plants in the citrus family, Rutaceae. It is distributed in Asia, Australia, and the Pacific Islands.Digital edition by the
University and State Library Düsseldorf
The University and State Library Düsseldorf (german: Universitäts- und Landesbibliothek Düsseldorf, abbreviated ULB Düsseldorf) is a central service institution of Heinrich Heine University. Along with Bonn and Münster, it is also one of th ...