Emil Hassler

Emil Hassler (1864 to 1937) was a Swiss physician, ethnographer, naturalist and botanist, known above all for his collections and his work describing the flora and culture of Paraguay. Born in Aarau, he studied medicine in France and finished his studies in Rio de Janeiro, then began practising in Cuiabá, Brazil, in 1884 and from 1887 worked at a hospital at San Bernardino near Asunción. He made ethnographic collections in the Mato Grosso, northern Paraguay and the Chaco, about five thousand items of which were acquired by the Field Museum in Chicago, and from 1895 he assembled botanical collections that the source describes as the foundation of scientific knowledge of the flora of Paraguay, published as Plantae Hasslerianae from 1898. During the Chaco War in 1932 he set up and ran a hospital for the wounded at San Bernardino, working there as a surgeon, and he received an honorary doctorate from the Universidad Nacional de Asunción in 1934. He died in Asunción in 1937.