O. E. H. Wucherer

Otto Edward Henry Wucherer (1820 to 1873) was a Brazilian medical doctor and naturalist, born to a Dutch mother and a German father. Born in Porto, he moved to Hamburg and worked in a pharmacy, then studied medicine at Tubingen, graduating in 1841 as a pupil of Ferdinand Gottlieb von Gmelin. He practised in London at St Bartholomew Hospital and in Lisbon before emigrating to Brazil in 1843, where he settled as a doctor in Salvador, Bahia, and lived until 1871. With John Ligertwood Paterson and Jose Francisco da Silva Lima he co-founded the Escola Tropicalista da Bahia at the Faculty of Medicine of Bahia, and he helped found the journal Gazeta Medica da Bahia. He discovered filaria larvae in Bahia, and his name is attached to the roundworm genus Wuchereria as well as to two reptile species. He also described the snake species Atractus guentheri and Xenopholis scalaris.