Leading 19th-century Czech chemist and the founder of Czech organic chemistry and biochemistry. He studied carbohydrates and also engaged in analytical chemistry. He is the author of a large number of Czech textbooks and was the teacher of many important figures in Czech chemistry, including Nobel Prize winner Jaroslav Heyrovský. He also devoted part of his career to developing Czech science institutions as the Secretary General of the Czech Academy of Sciences and Arts.

Bohuslav Raýman was born in Sobotka to the very poor family of a rural clerk. What is more, his father died soon afterwards and the remainder of his family moved to Mladá Boleslav. There, the young Raýman passed his final leaving examinations with flying colours and, as he was interested in chemistry, he enrolled to study at the Czech Polytechnic Institute in Prague, where Professor Vojtěch Šafařík took him under his wing. He saw that the young man was talented and recommended him to study with the world-famous organic chemist F. A. Kekulé in Bonn, under whom he spent several years learning the very latest methods and theory in organic chemistry. He later moved to France to work with other leading figures in world chemistry – C. A. Wurtz and C. Friedel, where he started to engage in his own research and published his first important works. When he returned to Prague he was a fully-fledged chemist with the best possible education and experience he could have attained. He started working in his home polytechnic, where he soon qualified and promoted teaching and experimental work in the new field of organic chemistry and also biochemistry, which, thanks to his efforts, was just starting to develop. His work and the time he spent teaching other students make him one of the founders of these fields in this country. Eventually his pupils came to include whole generations of prominent Czech chemists, including, for example, the Nobel Prize winner Jaroslav Heyrovský. Besides his own scientific work, Raýman also devoted a great deal of effort to writing chemistry textbooks in Czech, which were rare at that time, and for many chemists became the main source of information on organic chemistry in Czech. He studied carbohydrates, and preparative and analytical chemistry and was the co-author of the Czech chemical nomenclature. He helped to establish research institutions and journals on the topic of chemistry, was responsible for the revival of the Živa science journal, which is still published today, and also published a great many popular educational texts.

Connected places: Plaque commemorating Bohuslav Raýman in SobotkaPamětní deska Bohuslava Raýmana v Sobotce

Keywords: organic chemistry; chemistry; biochemistry; Nobel Prize; chemical nomenclature; Živa