Hendrik van Rijgersma

Hendrik Elingsz van Rijgersma was a Dutch naturalist who was a physician, amateur botanist, malacologist, and ichthyologist.

Biography
Rijgersma was born January 5, 1835 in the town of Lemmer, Friesland. In 1858, he became a physician, and practiced the studies of medicine in the town of Jisp on the island of Marken. In 1861, Rijgersma married Maria Henriette Gräfing, of whom he had seven children with.

When slavery was abolished in the Dutch colonies as of 1863, Rijgersma was one of the six physicians appointed to provide medical care for former slaves on the island of St. Martin in the Netherlands Antilles, where he served as an important government physician until his death at the age of 42. On the island, Rijgersma collected several fossils, plants, birds, reptiles, fishes, mollusks, crustaceans, and insects.

Rijgersma was known to have been an excellent painter, and left the future many, mostly unpublished, drawings, sketches, and water colors of plants, shells, and other things.

His collections of animals were sent by himself to the Academy of Natural Sciences in Philadelphia, of which he was a corresponding member. The plant specimens he sent to the Botanical Garden in Berlin were destroyed in 1945. There are also apparently plants that Rijgersma collected at the National Herbarium of the Netherlands in Leyden. Located within the Swedish Museum of Natural History in Stockholm, there are 129 plants collected by Rijgersma, of which, 74 have illustrations.