Christian Rudolph Wilhelm Wiedemann

Christian Rudolph Wilhelm Wiedemann (December 7, 1770 in Brunswick – December 31, 1840 in Kiel), was a German physician, historian, naturalist and entomologist. He is best known for his studies of world Diptera, but he also studied Hymenoptera and Coleoptera, although far less expertly.

Wiedemann’s father, Conrad Eberhard Wiedemann (1722–1804) was an art dealer and his mother, Dorothea Frederike (née Raspe) (1741–1804) was the daughter of an accountant in the Royal Mining Service and also interested in the arts.

After his education in Brunswick, he matriculated in 1790 to the Faculty of Medicine at the University of Jena where he was a contemporary of the poet Friedrich von Hardenberg.

While attending university, Wiedemann, was one of the many pupils of Johann Friedrich Blumenbach, and travelled to Saxony and Bohemia. He obtained his doctoral degree in 1792 with a thesis entitled Dissertatio inauguralis sistens vitia gennus humanum debilitantia. He then went to England to increase his knowledge of mineralogy.

Appointed Professor of Anatomy at Brunswick’s Collegium Carolinum in 1794, his inaugural address was about a medical condition observed in a boy at ,Llandeilo, Wales. It was titled Über das fehlende Brustbein, English “On the missing breastbone”.

In 1796 he married Luise Michaelis, the daughter of Johann David Michaelis, an Orientalist. They would raise the two sons of Luise's brother, who died in a cholera epidemic. The couple had nine children of their own, two dying in infancy.

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