Johann Michael Fehr

Johann Michael Fehr was a German medical doctor and botanist, born in Kitzingen on 9 May 1610 and died in Schweinfurt on 15 November 1688. He studied medicine at several universities and took his doctorate at the University of Padua in 1641 before returning to Schweinfurt to practise and to study plants. On 1 January 1652 he and three other physicians founded the Academia Naturae Curiosorum, later the Leopoldina. After the death of the first president, Johann Lorenz Bausch, in 1665 he became the second president, and in 1672 the academy won official recognition from Emperor Leopold I. He became personal physician to the emperor in 1686 and was briefly mayor of Schweinfurt in 1688.