Conrad Gessner

Conrad Gessner, who lived from 1516 to 1565, was a Swiss physician, naturalist, bibliographer and philologist born into a poor family in Zurich. Supported through university by his father and teachers, he studied classical languages, theology and medicine, took his doctorate in medicine in 1541, and practised in Zurich for the rest of his life, serving as the city physician after 1554. He found time to collect, research and write on a vast scale, producing a monumental bibliography, the Bibliotheca universalis, and a monumental zoology, the Historia animalium, and he was working on a major botanical text when he died of plague at the age of 49. He was often the first to describe species in Europe, such as the tulip in 1559, and is regarded as the father of modern scientific bibliography, zoology and botany.