Swiss anatomist and botanist who, along with his older brother Jean Johannes, published some of the first works of systematic botany. With a physician for a father Gaspard (also referred to as Caspar) Bauhin was taught anatomy by his father and botany by his brother, who was almost 20 years his senior. Attending the University of Basel in 1572 he received his bachelor's degree in philosophy in 1575. That same year he travelled to Padua, Italy, where he stayed for 18 months studying anatomy and undertaking dissections. Bauhin also visited Bologna, Montpellier, Paris and Tübingen over the following years, but settled back in Basel in 1580. Here he received a doctorate for his thesis De dolore colico and was named professor in 1582.

Although his professorship was in Greek, Bauhin taught botany in the botanic garden and anatomy in the dissection theatre, and in 1589 a special chair of botany and anatomy was created for him. Keen on practical education, he took students into the field to botanise during the summer months. While teaching at this establishment Bauhin served as dean of the medical faculty and was four times rector of the university. Eventually, in 1615, he was named professor of medicine. Married three times, Bauhin had one daughter by his first wife and two more and a son (Gaspard Jean) by his third, Magdalena Burckhardt.

As a researcher, Bauhin was interested in many aspects of plant sciences and human biology, although he is best known in both fields for his contributions to nomenclature and classification. Although he believed himself the discoverer of the ileocecal valve (which even used to bear his name) instead his major contribution to the study of anatomy was in reforming the naming system for muscles. Also interested in caesarean sections, hermaphrodites and other 'monstrous births' he published widely and produced several text books for his pupils.

The work for which Bauhin is most famous, however, is in the field of botany. His Pinax Theatri botanici (1623) contains the names of some 6,000 plants which were classified based on multiple shared characteristics. Although the higher level arrangement of the work is quite antiquated, he does accurately group together the legumes as well as the grasses and the mints. The most important advance, however, was in his naming system. Bauhin advocated the use of generic and specific names and his concept of what constitutes a genus has remained largely unchanged to this day. Whittling down polynomial descriptions into a specific name of just one to four words, he has often been heralded as the creator of a binomial system, although this cannot be so as a single species name was not used throughout.

Bauhin's primary aim was to unite herbal lists by the use of just one name for each plant and for this reason it was more a list of synonyms than actual plant descriptions. Ultimately, his 40 years' worth of labour saw the end of the 'herbalist' period of botany and enabled classification to flourish as a field of its own, aside from the medicinal application of plants. This work was preceded by a Prodromus (1620), and after his death Bauhin's son, Gaspard Jean, edited and published a Theatri botanici liber primus (1658).

Another reason for the success of Bauhin and his Pinax was his heavy reliance on herbarium specimens, a practice which was yet to become widespread. Gathering examples for study he exchanged them with other scholars, assuring him that they were talking about the same plant when he listed its synonyms. His herbarium of 4,000 numbers is still held in Basel. The genus Bauhinia was dedicated to him and his brother by Carl Linnaeus, perhaps because it has two-lobed leaves.

Sources:
D. Isely, 1994, One hundred and one botanists: 49
W. Junk, 1926, Portraits of old Botanists
G. Whitteridge, 1970, "Gaspard Bauhin", Dictionary of Scientific Biography, 1: 522-525.