Richard King (1811?–1876) was an English surgeon, Arctic traveller and early ethnological writer.
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He was born about 1811, and trained at Guy's Hospital and St Thomas's Hospital in London. He became M.R.C.S. on 29 June, L.S.A. 16 Aug. 1832, and obtained in the following year the honorary degree of M.D. of New York. He was subsequently made a member of the court of examiners of the Apothecaries' Society in London.
Shortly after qualifying as a medical man he obtained the post of surgeon and naturalist in the expedition led by Captain George Back, to the mouth of the Great Fish River (now known as the Back River) between 1833 and 1835, in search of Captain John Ross. He took a prominent part in the expedition, and is frequently mentioned in Back's Narrative (1836), to which he contributed botanical and meteorological appendices.
On 20 July 1842 King issued the prospectus which originated the Ethnological Society of London. He published an address to the society, of which he was the first secretary, in 1844 and when both it and its successor, the Anthropological Society, were in 1870 merged in the Anthropological Institute of Great Britain, King became a member of the council of the institute. He was also a member of the general council of the British Association.
When in 1845 the Admiralty proposed the Franklin expedition, King wrote very strongly to Lord Stanley, then Secretary of State for War and the Colonies, recommending, instead of the polar sea journey, a land journey by the Great Fish River, and offering his services. The Admiralty lent a cold ear both to this project and to those which King would have substituted for the measures proposed for the relief of John Franklin in 1849. King was in 1850 appointed assistant-surgeon to the Resolute, in the expedition sent out to search for Franklin under Captain Horatio Austin, and in 1857 he received the Arctic Medal for his services.
He received sympathy in his grievances from the newspapers of the time, but his eccentricity told against him. He died in obscurity at his residence in Blandford Street, Manchester Square, London, on 4 February 1876.
He published an independent account of the expedition under George Back, entitled Narrative of a Journey to the Shore of the Arctic Ocean under command of Captain Back, 2 vols. 1836. In it he took a more sanguine view than his commander of the value of the Back River as a base for future arctic exploration. In 1855 he drew up a summary of his correspondence with the Admiralty, entitled The Franklin Expedition from first to last, in which he criticised the government.
King was a contributor to the Journals of the Ethnological Sociery and Statistical Society, to the Medical Times, of which he was for some time editor, and to other periodicals. With two medical books on the cause of death in still-born infants he published:
This article incorporates text from a publication now in the public domain: Dictionary of National Biography. London: Smith, Elder & Co. 1885–1900.