Caspar Wistar (physician)

Caspar Wistar was an American physician and anatomist, born in Philadelphia in 1761 and dead in 1818, sometimes called Caspar Wistar the Younger to tell him from his grandfather of the same name, a German immigrant and glassmaker. He was educated at the Friends school in Philadelphia, began his medical studies under John Redman after helping to care for the wounded of the battle of Germantown, took his bachelor of medicine at the University of Pennsylvania in 1782 and his doctorate at Edinburgh in 1786, where he twice presided over the Royal Medical Society. Back in Philadelphia from 1787 he served as a physician to the dispensary and taught chemistry and the institutes of medicine in the College of Philadelphia before moving to the medical department of the University of Pennsylvania. In 1787 he and Timothy Matlack presented a probable dinosaur bone to the American Philosophical Society. The plant genus Wisteria is named for him.