Joseph Jakob Plenck

Joseph Jakob Plenck, also spelled Plenk (28 November 1738 to 24 August 1807), was a physician and polymath of the Holy Roman Empire who is now known as a pioneer of dermatology. He was born in Vienna, although some sources give 1732 as his birth year, and he graduated at the University of Vienna in 1763 as a follower of Heinrich Johann Nepomuk von Crantz. He held an academic post at the University of Basel in 1770, then taught at Buda and Pesth, and in 1783 moved to the Josephinum in Vienna. A prolific writer whose subjects included surgery, he published in 1776 a classification of skin diseases, Doctrina de morbis cutaneis, which introduced a consistent system dividing skin disease into 14 classes. In 1861 the botanist Siegfried Reisseck named Plenckia, a genus of South American flowering plants in the family Celastraceae, in his honor.