Richard King (1811?–1876) was an English surgeon, Arctic traveller, and early ethnological writer.
[2] Shortly after qualifying as a medical man King 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.
With two medical books on the cause of death in still-born infants he published:[2] King's reputation as argumentative is well-established, but he is now better thought of than by many of his influential contemporaries.
His view of the Back expedition as having missed opportunities and implicit argument for recognition of his own contribution are accepted by the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography.
[2] 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 gave a deaf 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.