Carolus Linnaeus was born in the small town of South Rashult. His love for flowers was developed at a very young age. At the age of only eight years old he had earned the nickname “the little botanist”. He studied at Lund and at Uppsala, from which he received his degree in medicine. At Uppsala he met the veteran botanist Olof Celsius, an event that had a profound influence on his career. He was then …showed first 75 words of 359 total…

…showed last 75 words of 359 total…as a practicing physician. In 1739 he married Sara Moraea, the daughter of a physician. Two years after his marriage he was appointed to the chair of medicine at Uppsala but a year later exchanged this for the chair of botany, his true calling. An inveterate classifier, he not only systematized the plant and animal kingdoms but even classified the mineral kingdom and drew up a treatise on the kinds of diseases known in his day.