Georg Buschan

Born in Frankfurt (Oder) on April 14, 1863, and later based in Stettin, he trained both as a medical doctor and as a scholar of the humanities, earning doctorates in medicine and philosophy. After his studies he worked as a naval doctor, eventually reaching the rank of Marinegeneraloberarzt, before settling into medical practice.

Alongside medicine, he built a substantial career as an ethnologist and ethnographer. He traveled in the Balkans, Africa, and East Asia between 1911 and 1926, with especially extensive journeys in German Cameroon, and he wrote for a broad public as well as specialist readers. He also founded and edited the journal Centralblatt für Anthropologie, Ethnologie und Urgeschichte, co-edited Ethnologischer Anzeiger, and at one time chaired the Gesellschaft für Völker- und Erdkunde.

His best-known works include Illustrierte Völkerkunde, regarded in its day as a major survey of the field, and the multi-volume Die Sitten der Völker. His bibliography also ranges across medicine and cultural history, from an 1894 monograph on Graves' disease to later books such as Menschenkunde, Im Anfang war das Weib, and Über Medizinzauber und Heilkunst im Leben der Völker. He died on November 6, 1942.