Biography

German physician sent to eastern Russia as a naturalist on the Orenburg Expedition. Johann Gottfried Heinzelmann worked in Moscow as a physician in the campaign office of Field Marshal Minikh. It seems he travelled east on a botanical trip with Traugott Gerber around 1732, visiting the Volga and Don rivers, although nothing of their journey was published. Several of Heinzelmann's manuscripts did, however, make it to Carl Linnaeus and can now be found at the Linnean Society of London, including a "Catalogus Plantarum", a "Flora Tartarica Oreburgensis" and (written with Gerber) a "Flora Samarcensis Tartarica".

Heinzelmann was recruited for the Orenburg expedition by Johann Amman, botanist at the Russian Academy of Sciences. He was given a shining reference by Gerber, who described him as well educated and knowledgeable in the fields of ancient and modern history, politics, geography, heraldry, genealogy and jurisprudence, as well as botany. The expedition left Moscow in 1734 and sailed to Kazan down the Volga River. At Ufa the military section of the expedition travelled on to found the town of Orenburg at the confluence of the Or and Yaik rivers. Heinzelmann moved from Ufa to Samara and Simbirsk, and later probably made it as far as Orenburg and the Aral Sea.

Unfortunately, at the death of the expedition's leader in 1737, Heinzelmann was sent back to Moscow. He had, though, gathered many botanical specimens and collected important data on the geography and history of the Bashkiria region and the southern Urals. Amman, who received Heinzelmann's specimens, prepared a catalogue which contained 401 species. Although never published, the manuscript of this catalogue is preserved in the archives of the Russian Academy of Sciences. Amman was also in regular correspondence with Sir Hans Sloane who expressed his excitement at the varieties Heinzelmann had collected, including many new species and plants which were not expected to grow in the Bashkirian climate.

Sources:
W.J. Bryce, 2008, A Botanist's Paradise: The Establishment of Scientific Botany in Russia in the Eighteenth Century
The Linnaean Correspondence, document L0216:
http://linnaeus.c18.net/Letters/display_txt.php?id_letter=L0216, accessed 26 November 2010.