Johann Christian Polycarp Erxleben

Johann Christian Polycarp Erxleben was a German naturalist from Quedlinburg, born in 1744 and dead at thirty-three in 1777. He was professor of physics and veterinary medicine at the University of Goettingen and wrote textbooks of natural philosophy and of chemistry, the Anfangsgruende der Naturlehre of 1772 and the Anfangsgruende der Chemie of 1775. His Systema regni animalis of 1777 is an early systematic work on the animal kingdom. In 1771 he founded the first and oldest academic veterinary school in Germany, the Institute of Veterinary Medicine. He was the son of Dorothea Christiane Erxleben, the first woman in Germany to earn a medical degree, and he also helped bring Peter Simon Pallas natural history of remarkable animals into German.