Dr Georg Balthasar Wohlfarth (✝︎)

Georg Balthasar Wohlfarth was born as the second child of surgeon Georg Wohlfarth in Schweinfurt on 11 June 1607. His older sister, Ursula, had been born on 12 June 1601. His father was a Protestant refugee from the Steiermark who later became a councillor in Schweinfurt. His mother, the daughter of steel and retail trader Benedikt Oberländer, hailed from Schleiz in the Vogtland. One year after her untimely death at the age of just 25 in 1610, Georg Wolfarth married Dorothea Stör, the widowed daughter of Johann Fischer, Schweinfurt’s mayor. His second wife cared for the two children. Georg Balthasar Wohlfarth had a private tutor and was introduced to medicine by his father.

In 1634, he married Susanna, daughter of Daniel Graf, a trader from Kitzingen, and the widow of Kaspar Pollich, a merchant, in Schweinfurt. The couple did not have any children and Susanna passed away in 1673.

In 1634, a plague epidemic raged in Schweinfurt, and Wohlfarth rendered outstanding services to the community in combating the disease, “especially during the contagion that raged in 1634 and the years following”.

The limited surviving details regarding his life, education, and personality are preserved primarily through the funeral sermon delivered in his honour by Schweinfurt parish priest Caspar Heunisch. The sermon’s author praised Wohlfarth’s piety, his selfless service as a general practitioner and his erudition. He also mentioned that the townspeople referred to Wohlfarth as the “herb doctor”.
Georg Balthasar Wohlfarth died in Schweinfurt on 31 January 1674.
To date, no representation of him has been discovered.

Georg Balthasar Wohlfarth began his career as apothecary’s apprentice in Kitzingen, and in 1629 went on to study medicine at the Universities of Altdorf near Nuremberg, Strasbourg and Basel. Having completed his studies, he embarked on an educational trip to Switzerland and Italy, an intrinsic part of a medical scholar’s training at the time. Wohlfarth was forced to cut his travels short for family reasons. Having earned his doctorate in Altdorf on 8 April 1634, he returned to Schweinfurt at his father’s behest to establish a general practice.

Here, on 1 January 1652, Wohlfarth, together with physicians Johann Laurentius Bausch, Johann Michael Fehr and Georg Balthasar Metzger, founded the Academia Naturae Curiosorum, the precursor of the Deutsche Akademie der Naturforscher Leopoldina (German Academy of Natural Scientists Leopoldina), the oldest continuously existing academy of medicine and natural sciences in the world. The founders invited other leading scholars to join them in “exploring nature [...] for the glory of God and the good of mankind.” The selected motto for this ambitious objective was “Nunquam otiosus“ (“never idle”).

A key motivation behind establishing the academy was recognising that the immense wealth of the natural world demanded a collaborative research effort. At the start, all four founding members were assigned a research topic. Wohlfarth’s topic was the investigation of moose (alces). This approach stemmed from the desire to systematically create an alphabetically structured encyclopaedia.

Georg Balthasar Wohlfarth was one of the founding members of the Academia Naturae Curiosorum, the precursor of the Deutsche Akademie der Naturforscher Leopoldina (German Academy of Natural Scientists Leopoldina), earning him the matriculation number 4 and allowing him to choose the byname Alceus.