Bernhard Christian Otto

Bernhard Christian Otto was a German medical doctor, professor of medicine, naturalist and economist, born in 1745 at Niepars near Stralsund, the son of a pastor, and living to 1835. He studied medicine at Göttingen and took his doctorate in 1771. From 1772 he taught at the Greifswald medical faculty, lecturing on surgery and on delivery for midwives and surgeons, added natural history lectures in 1776 and became professor of natural history and economics in 1781, while also managing the botanical garden. After serving as rector at Greifswald he moved in 1788 to the university at Frankfurt on the Oder as professor of medicine, and he stayed on there in retirement when the university moved to Breslau. He translated Buffon on birds from French into German and in doing so gave binomial names to some species, which makes him the authority for Picus candidus. He became blind late in life.