Dorothea Frances Matilda Pertz FLS was a British botanist.
10 Facts About Dorothea Pertz
1.
2.
Dorothea Pertz co-authored five papers with Francis Darwin, Charles Darwin's son.
3.
Dorothea Pertz was made a Fellow of the Linnean Society, among the first women admitted to full membership.
4.
Dora Pertz was born in London on 14 March 1859 to Georg Heinrich Pertz and his second wife, Leonora Horner, daughter of Leonard Horner, who was a progressive intellectual and an adamant supporter of Darwinism, a fact he noted in his final address.
5.
Dorothea Pertz grew up in a family where women were well-educated and intellectually active; one of her aunts was the botanist Katharine Murray Lyell, who was a biographer of Charles Lyell, her brother-in-law.
6.
Dorothea Pertz spent most of her youth in Berlin, where her father was Royal Librarian, though they visited England each year.
7.
Dorothea Pertz spent a year in Italy before returning to Cambridge in 1884.
8.
Dorothea Pertz subsequently undertook research into plant physiology, working under Francis Darwin, a reader at the university.
9.
Dorothea Pertz did much of her work unpaid out of passion for science, and she never had a formal appointment at Newnham or the university.
10.
Dorothea Pertz performed charity work, including working as a masseuse at a convalescent hospital in Cambridge during the First World War.