Nikolaus Ager

Nikolaus Ager, also written Nicolas Ager and sometimes called Agerius, was a physician and botanist born in 1568 at Ittenheim in Alsace who died in Strasbourg in 1634. He studied medicine at Basel and then earned doctorates in medicine and philosophy at Strasbourg, where in 1618 he became professor of medicine and botany. He worked closely with the botanists Johann and Gaspard Bauhin. His writings include early theses and disputations such as the Theses physico-medicae de homine sano and a disputation on dysentery, both of 1593, a disputation on zoophytes in 1625, and the treatise De Anima Vegetativa in 1629. Between 1623 and 1634 he issued a series of disputations on life and death, nutrition, the human mind, monsters, and sleep and dreams. In 1602 he also published a new edition of Walther Hermann Ryff's German apothecary book. The botanist Michel Adanson named the genus Ageria after him in 1763.