page_title: House of Soterius von Sachsenheim
section_title: Arthur Soterius von Sachsenheim
hierarchical_section_title: House of Soterius von Sachsenheim / Arthur Soterius von Sachsenheim
caption_attribution_description: English: Photo of the thirty scientists that participated in the 1896 Earling Jarl expedition to Svalbard.
context_page_description: Soterius von Sachsenheim is a Transylvanian Saxon noble family originating from the village Stein, in the former Saxon Repser Stuhl administrative division. Among its members were politicians and bureaucrats in the Transylvanian state administration and also army officers, scholars, pastors and artists.
context_section_description: Dr. med. Arthur Soterius von Sachsenheim was born on 31 July 1852, in Békéscsaba, where at that time his father Albert Conrad was serving in the army. After graduating the Gymnasium in Mediasch, he studied medicine at the University of Vienna with student residencies in Graz, Berlin and Würzburg, receiving the doctor diploma for general medical practice. He enrolled in 1881 in Vienna to attend a course for the military medical school and was drafted in 1882 to the garrison hospital in Triest. Here he took a great interest in the lively activities of the shipping lines and in February 1883 he quit his military service and was taken on by the Austro-Hungarian Lloyd Steamship company as ship’s doctor. In this capacity he visited the Mediterranean area and went twice to Brazil. He also traveled to the coastal countries of the Red Sea, followed by India, Sir Lanka, Indonesia and China.  
  After about two years of almost uninterrupted travel, in March 1885 he returned to Transylvania and became a physician in Marienburg (today Feldioara).  Here he married Wilhelmina Gust, who gave birth to three daughters (among them, Edith Soterius von Sachsenheim). From February 1889, he is in secondary position at the Franz Josef Hospital in Herrmannstadt (in 1904 he would become the chief physician there).
  Arthur participated in the 1896 expedition of the steamer Erling Jarl, when thirty scientists from thirty countries were sent to explore the region around Svalbard (Spitzbergen). There they met Salomon August Andrée, who was preparing his 1897 Arctic Balloon Expedition, they were also seeking news of Fridtjof Nansen, who had attempted to go as far north as possible (and succeeded), but his whereabouts were not know until sometime later in 1896. Arthur collected ethnographic objects, mammal skeletons and molluscs (including a mollusk later named Neptunea sachsenheimi). After returning from the expedition, he wrote the publication From Transylvania to Spitzbergen (available in ASTRA National Museum Complex).
  He donated to the Transylvanian Association for Natural Sciences a collection of over 100 ethnographic objects gathered from various parts of the world. This collection was one of the initial core collections of "Franz Binder" Museum of Universal Ethnography opened in 1933 in Sibiu, part of ASTRA National Museum Complex.
caption: The team of the 1896 Erling Jarl expedition. Arthur S.v.S. is in the front to the right with the white cap and beard.
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