Karl Rudolphi

Karl Asmund Rudolphi (1771 to 1832) was a Swedish-born German naturalist, credited as the father of helminthology. Born in Stockholm to German parents, he took his PhD in 1793 and his medical doctorate in 1794 at the University of Greifswald, where he became Professor of Anatomy. He worked across botany, zoology, anatomy and physiology, investigated the anatomy of nerves, studied plant growth and was an early champion of the view that the cell is the basic structural unit of plants; in 1804 he and J. H. F. Link shared a prize from the Göttingen society for showing that cells have independent walls. His first great publication, a study of parasitic worms, was the first to describe the Nematoda, and his Synopsis was the first to detail the life cycle of important nematode parasites of humans such as Ascaris lumbricoides. From 1810 until his death he was Professor of Anatomy and Physiology at the University of Berlin, where he served two terms as rector and founded the Berlin Zootomical Museum. In 1816 he was elected a foreign member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences.