Conrad Gessner

Conrad Gessner (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, and became Zurich's city physician while finding time for collecting, research and writing. He compiled monumental works on bibliography, the Bibliotheca universalis of 1545 to 1549, and on zoology, the Historia animalium of 1551 to 1558, and 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 of plants or animals in Europe, such as the tulip in 1559, and a number of plants and animals have been named after him. His research combined observation, dissection, travel to distant lands and accurate description, an approach that was new to Renaissance scholars who had relied on classical writers.