August Wilhelm Henschel
German botanist and medical historian (1790-1856)
August Wilhelm Eduard Theodor Henschel (Breslau, 20 December 1790 – Breslau, 24 July 1856) was a German medical doctor and botanist, best known through his works on history of medicine and about Schola Medica Salernitana.
Biography
Education
He was educated at the medical and surgical college at Breslau, the Ober-Collegium medicum in Berlin, and the universities of Heidelberg and Breslau (Medicinae Doctor in 1813). He practised medicine in Breslau from 1813 to 1816, and in the latter year was appointed Privatdozent in pathology at the university of that city.
Henschel was of Jewish origin, the son of the physician Elias Henschel (1755–1839); in 1820 he converted to Christianity.
Scholarly and main works
In 1820, Henschel published his first important work, Von der Sexualität der Pflanzen, on the linnaean taxonomy, which attracted considerable attention in the world of science. He was appointed assistant professor at his alma mater in 1821, and in 1832 professor of anatomy, physiology, and pathology.
Henschel is best known through his researches into the history of medicine, the results of which he published in the medical periodical Janus, Zeitschrift für Geschichte und Litteratur der Medizin (Breslau, 1846–49). Of his other works may be mentioned: Vertheidigung der Entzündlichen Natur des Croups (in Anton Ludwig Ernst Horn's Archiv für medizinische Erfahrungen, 1813); Commentatio de Aristotele Botanico et Philosopho, Breslau, 1824; Über einige Schwierigkeiten in der Pathologie der Hundswuth, Breslau, 1829; Zur Geschichte der Medicin in Schlesien, Breslau, 1837; and Das Medicinische Doctorat, seine Nothwendigkeit und seine Reform, Breslau, 1848.
Works
The standard author abbreviation Hensch. is used to indicate this person as the author when citing a botanical name.
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