Ole Borch

Ole Borch (1626 to 1690), Latinised as Olaus Borrichius, was a Danish scientist, physician, grammarian and poet who served as royal physician to Frederick III and Christian V of Denmark. Born at Nørre Bork in the diocese of Ribe, the son of a parish priest, he studied medicine at the University of Copenhagen, became a lector at Vor Frue Skole in 1650 and distinguished himself in the plague of 1654. Between 1660 and 1665 he toured Germany, the Netherlands, France, England and Italy with the sons of his patron Joachim Gersdorff, meeting Robert Boyle in England and keeping journals that are an important document of the European scientific climate of the seventeenth century. Back in Copenhagen in 1665 he became a professor of philology at the University of Copenhagen and in 1666 of chemistry and botany. A father of experimental science in Denmark, he founded Borchs Kollegium, introduced his former pupil Nicolas Steno to fossils, and extracted oxygen from saltpeter in 1678. He is commemorated in the plant genus Borrichia and in the snake Siagonodon borrichianus.