Background
His father, Florent Camper, was a clergyman, and other members of his family had long been distinguished in the local government.
His father, Florent Camper, was a clergyman, and other members of his family had long been distinguished in the local government.
Educated in medicine, he received his degree at Leiden in 1746.
Camper combined a deep aesthetic sense and interest in the arts with a love for natural history. It was this combination that led to some of the work for which he is still remembered. After visiting England and various scientific centers on the Continent, where he came into contact with the leading scientists of his day, he returned to the Netherlands and settled at Franeker in 1749 as professor of medicine and surgery. In 1755 he was called to Amsterdam where he was appointed professor at the Athenaeum. In 1761 he retired from Amsterdam, returning once more to Franeker. In 1763 he was appointed professor at Groningen.
Although Camper wrote on medical subjects, his best-known contributions lay in the field of natural history, a subject to which he was deeply devoted and which he approached primarily as a comparative anatomist. He dissected and reported exhaustively on orangutans, elephants, birds, and other animals. He described fossils that came to his attention and wrote about a considerable range of subject matter. He is an important historical figure in anthropology because of his discovery of the usefulness of the facial angle for determining not only differences between animals but also racial differences between the varieties of man. This represented one of the first attempts to bring measurement and objective observation to the problem of racial classification. Camper was widely known and respected. He received many of the highest honorary distinctions in science and also served his country in a political capacity.