Karl Moritz Gottsche

Gravestone at the Norderreihe cemetery in Altona

Karl Moritz Gottsche , also Carl Moritz Gottsche, (born July 3, 1808 in Altona ; † September 28, 1892 ibid) was a German doctor and botanist . Its official botanical author's abbreviation is " Gottsche ".

Life

Gottsche was the son of a wealthy shipowner . He received private lessons in Hamburg and went to grammar school in Hirschberg (Silesia) (where his family came from and where his uncle had a sugar factory). From 1828 he studied medicine in Berlin and received his doctorate there in 1831. He then studied for two semesters in Copenhagen (his hometown Altona was then part of Denmark), where he was an assistant in the maternity clinic until 1834, where he passed the state examination. After that he was a resident doctor in Altona. While still studying medicine, he undertook zoological and botanical studies, and in Altona he was mainly concerned with mosses. He carried out his investigations in this regard alongside his work as a doctor - after his father's death there was not much left of his inheritance and he had to earn his living as a doctor. Later he was the city doctor for the poor.

Gottsche was a leading authority on liverworts (Marchantiophyta), about which he wrote a monograph with Johann Bernhard Wilhelm Lindenberg (1782-1851), a lawyer and bailiff in Bergedorf , and the botanist Christian Gottfried Daniel Nees von Esenbeck in Breslau , with the plan originally came from Lindenberg and Nees van Esenbeck. Gottsche wrote a large part of the work including the precisely executed drawings. A planned supplementary volume no longer appeared because the publisher declined, and only two volumes of the Species Hepaticarum with Lindenberg appeared in 1847–1851. Gottsche published additions to a literature review on liverworts in the Botanical Journal (1858) and in 1867 in Copenhagen a book on Mexican liverworts (Hepaticae mexicanae). The basis for this was the collection of Frederik Michael Liebmann from the 1840s, whom he had known from his student days in Copenhagen and was his student at the time. He contributed to Gottlob Ludwig Rabenhorst's collection of dried cryptogams ( Exsiccaten collection) and in 1890 published a book about the liverworts of South Georgia. During a stay in Paris, a (never published) manuscript on the liverworts of France was created with Husnot. In his publications, he was sometimes very critical of colleagues and for this reason had a falling out with his former sponsor Johann Georg Christian Lehmann (director of the Hamburg Botanical Garden).

The genus Gottschea in the family of liverworts of the Schistochilaceae is named after him and many species of liverworts. He also dealt with deciduous mosses and published zoological works.

In 1881 he was awarded an honorary doctorate from the University of Kiel and he was a member of the Academy of Sciences in Copenhagen. He was also a member of the Leopoldina (based on a work on Haplomitrium hookeri from 1843). His drawings (4,000 sheets) and collections went to the Berlin Botanical Museum, but were burned in a bomb attack in 1943. Only a small part of his collection (from a Tierra del Fuego expedition) has been preserved, as it came to the Botanical Institute of the University of Hamburg via his daughter-in-law. However, many duplicate copies from his collection ended up in Munich via Sendtner's liverwort collection. He had been married since 1838 and had five children, including the geologist Carl Christian Gottsche .

Fonts

• with JBG Lindenberg, CG Nees van Esenbeck: Synopsis Hepaticarum , Hamburg, 5 parts, 1844–1847 ( doi: 10.5962 / bhl.title.15221 , online ).

literature

• Joseph B. Jack: Obituary, in: Reports German Botanical Society, Volume 11, 1893.
• Jan-Peter Frahm, Jens Eggers: Lexicon of German-speaking bryologists , Volume 1, Bonn 2001.
• Ernst Wunschmann:  Gottsche, Karl Moritz . In: Allgemeine Deutsche Biographie (ADB). Volume 49, Duncker & Humblot, Leipzig 1904, pp. 491-493.

Web links

• Author entry and list of the described plant names for Karl Moritz Gottsche at the IPNI