Biography

George Wallich, son of botanist Nathaniel Wallich, was a military surgeon and oceanographer. He was born in Calcutta, India, where his Danish-born father was the Superintendent of the Royal Botanic Gardens.

Wallich completed his education in Scotland, attending King's College, Aberdeen, and studying medicine at the University of Edinburgh. Graduating MD in 1836, he became a licentiate of the College of Surgeons (Edinburgh) the following year and joined the Indian Army as an assistant surgeon in 1838. Over the next two decades he served in the Sutlej and Punjab campaigns, and during the Santal rebellion of 1855-1856. He married Caroline Elizabeth Norton in 1851 (in England), with whom he would have eight children. Having returned to England in 1857 on sick leave, Wallich retired two years later with the rank of surgeon-major.

George Wallich inherited his father's interest in natural history and collected marine organisms during his voyage from India to England in 1857. The study of ocean life dominated the rest of his life and in 1860 he was appointed naturalist on board HMS Bulldog, then making its voyage to investigate a route for the north Atlantic telegraph cable. This expedition resulted in his most important publication, The North Atlantic Sea-Bed (1862).

Wallich penned a number of papers in the 1870s and 1880s, particularly on foraminiferan taxonomy and geological deposits. He also published a volume of photographic portraits of contemporary scientists. Wallich was never elected to the Royal Society, with which he had some qualms, but did receive the Gold Medal of the Linnean Society.

Sources:
Anon., 1899, British Medical Journal, 1(1999): 1003-1004
A.L. Rice, 2005, "Wallich, George Charles (1815-1899)", Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, online edn:
www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/38100, accessed 15 December 2011
A.L. Rice, H.L. Burstyn and A.G.E. Jones, 1974-1976, "G.C. Wallich, MD - megalomaniac or mis-used oceanographic genius?", Journal of the Society of the Bibliography of Natural History, 7: 423-450.