Reginald Koettlitz

Reginald Koettlitz (1860–1916) was a British physician and polar explorer. He participated in the Jackson-Harmsworth Expedition to Franz Josef Land (from 1894) and in the Discovery Expedition to Antarctica.

Reginald Koettlitz was born on 23 December 1860 in Oostende to a Dutch Lutheran minister and his English wife. The family settled in Hougham, Kent soon thereafter. He attended Dover College and later Guy's Hospital in London, where he received training as a physician and took up a post as a country doctor in County Durham.

Polar exploration

In 1894 he volunteered to join the Jackson-Harmsworth Expedition to Franz Josef Land as physician and geologist. On returning to Dover, Koettlitz brought back a polar bear, which is still in the Dover Museum. In 1901, he volunteered for Robert Falcon Scott’s Discovery Expedition to Antarctica, again as physician. His assistant on this trip was E.A. Wilson, later surgeon on Scott’s ill-fated Terra Nova Expedition. On a trip he led across McMurdo Sound, Koettlitz discovered two glacial features later named after him, the Koettlitz Glacier and the Koettlitz Neve. For his role in the Discovery Expedition, Koettlitz was awarded a medal from the Royal Geographical Society.

Later in life, he practised medicine in South Africa. He died from dysentery in January 1916 along with his wife.^[1]^[2]

Koettlitz Island (Ketlitsa Ostrova) – a low-lying island in the Britansky Kanal in the Franz Josef Land archipelago – is named after him, as were Koettlitz Glacier and the Koettlitz Neve, both in Antarctica.