Joseph Schröter

Joseph Schröter (1837 to 1894) was a German army physician and mycologist. Born at Patschkau in Upper Silesia as the son of an apothecary, he studied medicine at Breslau and from Easter 1856 at the Friedrich Wilhelm Academy in Berlin, which trained military doctors, where the botanist Alexander Braun taught him. He took his medical doctorate in December 1859 with a dissertation on cerebral paralysis and served as a regimental doctor in Saarlouis, Jülich and Aachen and from 1865 as a staff doctor in Breslau, always studying the plants of each posting. At Breslau he joined Ferdinand Cohn and made the study of fungi his life work. After the Franco-Prussian War he served at Spandau and Rostock, returned to Breslau in 1880, qualified there as a lecturer in 1886 and became professor in 1890, teaching bacteriology and other branches of mycology. He left military service in 1892. A research journey to Cyprus and Asia Minor in 1894 gave him malaria, and he died at Breslau on 12 December 1894.