Jacobus Bontius

Jacobus Bontius, or Jacob de Bondt (1592 to 1631), was a Dutch physician and a pioneer of tropical medicine, born in Leiden as the youngest of eight children of the physician Gerard de Bondt, a professor at Leiden University. His brothers included Reinier de Bondt, court physician to Maurice of Nassau, and the law professor Willem de Bondt. He graduated M.D. from Leiden in 1614 and sailed to the East Indies with Jan Pieterszoon Coen for the Dutch East India Company, and he died in Batavia in 1631. He is known for the four-volume De medicina Indorum, published after his death, which includes what is recognised as the first medical description of beriberi, and he reported on the dysentery epidemic in Java in 1628. His 1631 work on the natural and medical history of the East Indies introduced the Malay and Indonesian word Orang Hutan into Western European languages.