Professor Linnaeus

In 1741 Linnaeus was appointed to one of the chairs of medicine at Uppsala University. The same year, commissioned by the Swedish parliament, he went on an expedition to look for commercially useful natural resources on the islands of Öland and Gotland. During the coming years Linnaeus worked hard to restore the Botanical Garden in Uppsala and make it into a "living textbook" for his students. In 1746 he travelled to Västergötland and in 1749 to Skåne with orders from the Riksdag to explore these provinces too.

As a professor in Uppsala Linnaeus was very popular with his students, largely because of his great enthusiasm and different way of teaching. He also attracted a considerable number of foreign students. Several of his students had the opportunity to join important expeditions to discover nature in far-off lands. They sent home to Linnaeus many new species of plants and animals. Consequently when his binomial system of giving Latin names to plants (1753) and animals (1758) was published he was able to include many exotic species. This way of giving scientific names is still used all over the world.