Professor Dr Georg Balthasar Metzger (✝︎)

Georg Balthasar Metzger, the son of a surgeon, was born on 23 September 1623 in Schweinfurt. His grandfather had migrated to Schweinfurt as a religious refugee. The family somewhat climbed the social ladder, with Metzger’s father becoming a member of the Inner Council of the city of Schweinfurt.
Metzger was married to Katharina Margarete Küffner, the daughter of Johann Küffner, Schweinfurt’s superintendent. Georg Balthasar Metzger died in Tübingen on 9 October 1687.

Georg Balthasar Metzger studied medicine from 1643 to 1651 at the University of Altdorf near Nuremberg, as well as in Jena, Helmstedt, Leipzig, Padua and Basel. He earned his doctorate from Jena in 1644. He later joined the renowned University of Padua’s medical faculty, Europe’s most prestigious at the time, concentrating his studies on surgery and anatomy. An educational trip around Italy and/or Western Europe was an intrinsic part of a medical scholar’s training at the time. Metzger travelled from Venice to Naples, and before returning to Schweinfurt, he earned another doctorate, namely a doctorate in medicine from the University of Basel in October 1650. Upon his return to Schweinfurt, Metzger established a general practice.

Here, on 1 January 1652, Georg Balthasar Metzger, together with physicians Johann Laurentius Bausch, Johann Michael Fehr and Georg Balthasar Wohlfarth, founded the Academia Naturae Curiosorum, the precursor of the Deutsche Akademie der Naturforscher Leopoldina (German Academy of Natural Scientists Leopoldina), the oldest continuously existing academy of medicine and natural sciences in the world.  The four founders invited other leading scholars to join them in “exploring nature [...] for the glory of God and the good of mankind.” The selected motto for this ambitious objective was “Nunquam otiosus“ (“never idle”). A key motivation behind establishing the academy was recognizing that the immense wealth of the natural world demanded a collaborative research effort.
Georg Balthasar Metzger was appointed civil servant of the new academy. At the start, all four founding members were assigned a research topic. Metzger’s topic was the investigation of ambergris. This approach stemmed from the desire to systematically create an alphabetically structured encyclopaedia.

In 1653, Metzger moved from Schweinfurt to Giessen to take up a chair of medicine and physics at the Justus Liebig University. In 1661, he relocated to Tübingen, having accepted the chair of practice, anatomy and botany. Duke Eberhard III intended that Metzger properly teach anatomy and surgery and improve the quality of university teaching. Metzger was also Director of the botanical gardens, Hortus Medicus, in Tübingen from 1681 to 1688.

Georg Balthasar Metzger was a founding member of the Academia Naturae Curiosorum, earning him the matriculation number 3 and allowing him to choose the byname Americus.