10 Facts About Josef Herink

Josef Herink was a Czech physician and mycologist.

Josef Herink was born in Prague on 26 December 1915.

Josef Herink devoted much of his career as a mycologist to the study of his favourite genus, Lepiota, but he worked on the genera Agaricus, Armillaria, Cortinarius, Entoloma, Mycena, Omphalina, and on the species Helvella gabretae, Xerocomus moravicus, among others.

Josef Herink attached great importance to the use of chemical reagents for the delimitation and identification of species of agarics and boletes.

Josef Herink always had his reagents with him and used them systematically for his descriptions.

Josef Herink even developed specific chemical tests on the milk cap mushrooms.

Josef Herink tried to define macroscopic characters to allow the identification of agarics and boletes without resorting to microscopy.

Josef Herink was co-author of the red book of the cryptogamic flora of Slovakia and the Czech Republic published in 1995, where he listed twenty species of agarics and boletes, illustrated by his younger brother, the painter Jan Herink.

Josef Herink presented numerous lectures to the mycological society, not only on agarics and boletes, but on poisonous mushrooms and on nature conservation, the last, three months before his death, on the genus Clitocybe.

Josef Herink combined his training as a doctor and his passion for fungi by studying mushroom poisonings, their toxicity and their treatment, to which he devoted his best-known work Poisonings by Fungi, which was illustrated by his brother.