G. (Georg) Hartwig

Born in London on August 11, 1813, Georg Hartwig was a German physician and scientific writer who died on March 10, 1880, in Salon near Ludwigsburg in Württemberg. Reliable catalog and authority records identify him as both a physician and a man of science.

Hartwig is best remembered for popular natural history and geography books written for general readers rather than specialists. Surviving bibliographic records connect him with works such as The Sea and Its Living Wonders, The Tropical World, The Polar World, The Subterranean World, and The Aerial World, showing how often he wrote about the natural world on a grand scale.

His career seems to have combined medicine with science writing: early records include a medical work on sea-bathing and sea air, while later English editions of his books show that his writing circulated beyond German-speaking readers. Even from the titles alone, a clear picture emerges of an author who liked to gather the latest knowledge of his time and present it in an inviting, wide-angle way.