Joseph Jakob Ritter Plenk or Plenck (28 November 1738 – 24 August 1807) was an Austrian physician and polymath. He is now known as a pioneer

dermatologist Dermatology is the branch of medicine dealing with the skin.''Random House Webster's Unabridged Dictionary.'' Random House, Inc. 2001. Page 537. . It is a speciality with both medical and surgical aspects. A dermatologist is a specialist medical ...

Life

Plenck was born on 28 November 1738 in

Vienna en, Viennese , iso_code = AT-9 , registration_plate = W , postal_code_type = Postal code , postal_code = , timezone = CET , utc_offset = +1 , timezone_DST ...

, although some sources give a birth year of 1732. He graduated at the

University of Vienna The University of Vienna (german: Universität Wien) is a public research university located in Vienna, Austria. It was founded by Duke Rudolph IV in 1365 and is the oldest university in the German-speaking world. With its long and rich histor ...

in 1763, and was a follower of Heinrich Johann Nepomuk von Crantz. An academic at the

University of Basel The University of Basel (Latin: ''Universitas Basiliensis'', German: ''Universität Basel'') is a university in Basel, Switzerland. Founded on 4 April 1460, it is Switzerland's oldest university and among the world's oldest surviving universit ...

in 1770, he then taught at Tymau,

Buda Buda (; german: Ofen, sh-Latn-Cyrl, separator=" / ", Budim, Будим, Czech and sk, Budín, tr, Budin) was the historic capital of the Kingdom of Hungary and since 1873 has been the western part of the Hungarian capital Budapest, on the ...

and

Pesth Pest () is the eastern, mostly flat part of Budapest, Hungary, comprising about two-thirds of the city's territory. It is separated from Buda and Óbuda, the western parts of Budapest, by the Danube River. Among its most notable sights are the ...

. In 1783 he moved to the Josephinum in Vienna. He died on 24 August 1807. In 1861, botanist Siegfried Reisseck published '' Plenckia'', a genus of

flowering plant Flowering plants are plants that bear flowers and fruits, and form the clade Angiospermae (), commonly called angiosperms. The term "angiosperm" is derived from the Greek words ('container, vessel') and ('seed'), and refers to those plants th ...

s from South America, belonging to the family Celastraceae and named in honour of Joseph Jakob Plenck.

Works

Plenck was a prolific writer, on subjects including

surgery Surgery ''cheirourgikē'' (composed of χείρ, "hand", and ἔργον, "work"), via la, chirurgiae, meaning "hand work". is a medical specialty that uses operative manual and instrumental techniques on a person to investigate or treat a pat ...

. In 1776 he published a classification of skin diseases, ''Doctrina de morbis cutaneis''. It introduced a consistent system, dividing dermatosis into 14 classes.

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Plenk, Joseph Jakob 1738 births 1807 deaths Austrian dermatologists