Caspar Wistar (physician)



Caspar Wistar (September 13, 1761 – January 22, 1818) was an American physician and anatomist.

He was born at Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, the son of Thomas Wistar and Mary Waln Wistar and the grandson of Caspar Wistar (1696–1752), a German immigrant, Quaker and glassmaker. In 1788 he married Isabella Marshall, who died in 1790. He married Elizabeth Mifflin in 1798.

He studied medicine at the University of Edinburgh, then on his return to the U.S. taught at the University of Pennsylvania, developing a set of anatomical models &mdash; human remains preserved by injecting them with wax &mdash; to assist with the teaching of anatomy. He was an early promoter of vaccination. During the yellow fever epidemic of 1793 he suffered an attack of the disease contracted while caring for his patients. He published A System of Anatomy in two volumes from 1811–1814.

In 1787 he was elected to membership of the American Philosophical Society and from 1815 to 1818 he served as president.

The botanist Thomas Nuttall named the genus Wisteria in his honour (some call it Wistaria but the misspelling is conserved under the International Code of Botanical Nomenclature). The Wistar Institute in Philadelphia is named for Caspar Wistar.