Martin Lister

Martin Lister (1639 to 1712) was an English naturalist and physician, regarded as the first arachnologist and conchologist and recognised for his discovery of ballooning spiders. Born at Radcliffe near Buckingham, he was educated at St John's College, Cambridge, became a fellow in 1660, studied medicine in France from 1668 and practised as a physician at York from 1670 until he moved to London in 1683. He became a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1671, received his MD at Oxford in 1684 and became a Fellow of the Royal College of Physicians in 1687, and from 1709 until his death he was physician to Queen Anne. He contributed numerous articles on natural history, medicine and antiquities to the Philosophical Transactions, and his daughters Anne and Susanna were two of his illustrators and engravers. A prolific correspondent, he left more than 2,000 surviving letters in the Bodleian Library and other repositories, and he bequeathed his books and copper plates to the University of Oxford.