Genus Tieghemia

For Philippe Édouard Léon van Tieghem (1839–1914), French botanist, professor of botany. After qualifying with a PhD in physics (1864) and PhD in natural history (1866), he taught at the École Centrale des arts et Manufactures (1873–1886), was professor at the Muséum National d’Histoire Naturelle (1878–1914), and an instructor at the Institut Agronomique (1899–1914) in Paris. Among his achievements, he created the ‘Van Tieghem cell’, a device mounted on a microscope slide that allows for observing the development of a fungus’s mycelium; wrote many scientific papers and translated a botanical work by the German botanist Julius von Sach from German into French; and in 1876 was the first person to describe blastomycosis, a fungal infection that is also known as ‘Gilchrist disease’. In the same year, he was elected a member of the Academy of Sciences.