Background
Richard Harlan was born on September 19, 1796 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, United States. He was the eighth of ten children of Joshua Harlan, a wealthy Quaker farmer and merchant, and Sarah Hinchman.
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naturalist physician scientist Zoologist
Richard Harlan was born on September 19, 1796 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, United States. He was the eighth of ten children of Joshua Harlan, a wealthy Quaker farmer and merchant, and Sarah Hinchman.
Harlan studied medicine at the University of Pennsylvania and while he was still a student made a voyage to India as ship's surgeon. He took a degree in 1818 at the age of twenty-two.
Harlan began to practice medicine in Philadelphia. For a time he was in charge of the private dissecting room opened by his preceptor, Doctor Joseph Parrish. Three years after his graduation he was elected, in 1821, professor of comparative anatomy in the Philadelphia Museum and also surgeon to that institution.
In 1832 he was a member of a commission sent to Canada and New York by the Sanitary Board of Philadelphia to study the epidemic of Asiatic cholera prevalent at that time. Between 1832 and 1836 he was the corresponding secretary of the Geological Society of Pennsylvania and one of its three curators. In 1838 he visited Europe and after his return removed to New Orleans.
His most important publications in the field of medicine and human anatomy were Anatomical Investigations (1824) and certain papers in his Medical and Physical Researches (1835).
Harlan's major interest was the study of zoology and vertebrate paleontology. His first publication in the latter field, "Observations on Fossil Elephant Teeth of North America, " appeared in the Journal of the Academy of Natural Sciences of Philadelphia in June 1823, and was followed soon after, January 1824, by an article on the new genus Saurocephalus, a fossil reptile brought back by Lewis and Clark. In 1824 also he published his Observations on the Genus Salamandra and, as a result of an investigation of the West Jersey region in that year with Thomas Say and Titian Peale, he wrote a paper on an American Plesiosaur, a form hitherto supposed to be limited to Europe.
His most notable work Fauna Americana, the first systematic treatise on American mammals, appeared in 1825. A compilation based in large part on A. G. Desmarest's Mammalogie (1820-1822), it dealt with both living and extinct forms, grouping the fossil forms with what the author presumed to be their nearest living representative. The work was received with hostile criticism, and the second part, which was to have dealt with the reptiles, was never published. Harlan was undiscouraged, however; in 1826 he wrote a brief monograph on the "Genera of North American Reptilia, " and in 1827 published as a pamphlet his American Herpetology.
He was one of the first to support Featherstonhaugh's new Monthly American Journal of Geology, to which he contributed in 1831 an interesting paper on the Jeffersonian genus Megalonyx. In a paper read in 1832 on the discovery of an Ichthyosaurus in Missouri, he forecast the beginning of the discovery of the great fossil treasures of the West. Although the modern science of odontography, or odontology, was then virtually unknown, he contributed to the Geological Society of Pennsylvania in 1834 a paper "On the Structure and Teeth of the Edentata Fossil. "
During this same year he made his most extensive contribution to the science of vertebrate paleontology in his "Critical Notices of Various Organic Remains hitherto Discovered in North America. " This study was in large part a response to the desire of European naturalists for concrete information as to what had been accomplished in America. After his removal to New Orleans he published little. He died there of apoplexy at the age of forty-seven.
Richard Harlan went down in history as a a prolific scientist and writer, best remembered for his "Fauna Americana" and "American Herpetology. " He contributed papers to the Société Géologique de France, the Geological Society of London, and the British Association for the Advancement of Science. His chief service to American natural history was not his own research, however, so much as the collection and codification of the work of earlier writers in the field.
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In 1843 Harlan was elected vice-president of the Louisiana State Medical Society. He also was a corresponding member of the St Petersburg Academy of Sciences.
On January 30, 1833, Harlan married Margaret Hart (Simmons) Howell, a widow.