Frédéric-Louis Allamand

Frédéric-Louis Allamand was a Swiss botanist, born at Payerne in the canton of Vaud in 1736. In 1749 he moved to Leiden to live with his uncle Jean-Nicolas-Sébastien Allamand, a professor of philosophy and mathematics at Leiden University, a well known naturalist and a member of the Royal Society. He began by studying literature at Leiden but changed to medicine, and in 1760 he joined the Dutch marine as a ship's doctor, visiting Suriname and Guyana among other places. After his marriage in 1769 he became a doctor at the court of Catherine the Great in St Petersburg, and in 1793 he returned to Leiden to work at the university. He corresponded with Carl Linnaeus and described several plant genera himself, and the genus Allamanda is named in his honour. He died in 1809 at Valkenburg in South Holland.