Ignaz Sigismund Poetsch (20 October 1823 – 23 April 1884) was a Bohemian-born physician and lichenologist in the Austrian Empire and later Austria-Hungary. Trained as a medical doctor in Prague and Vienna, he worked as a hospital physician in Vienna before spending most of his career as works doctor in Gaming and monastery physician in Kremsmünster, both in present-day Austria. Alongside his medical duties he developed an extensive expertise in cryptogamic botany, especially mosses and lichens, and became one of the main recorders of the lichen funga of Lower Austria, Upper Austria, and Styria in the mid-nineteenth century. His herbarium comprised about 12,000 cryptogamic specimens and he contributed material and identifications to several major European exsiccata series. The genus Poetschia and a number of fungal and lichen species have been named in his honour.
Life Poetsch was born in 1823 in Turmaul, now Drmaly (part of Vysoká Pec in the Czech Republic), near the town of Jirkov at the foot of the Ore Mountains. He came from a poor family and attended elementary school in Rothenhaus from 1830 to 1834, the secondary school in Komotau (now Chomutov) from 1835 to 1836, and the monastic grammar school (Stiftsgymnasium) in Ossegg (today Osek) from 1836 to 1841. He then studied philosophy and the first two years of medicine at Charles University before moving to Vienna in 1845, where he completed his medical studies and graduated as Doctor of Medicine on 4 December 1849.
After qualifying he worked as a hospital doctor in Vienna, first as a substitute then as full Secundararzt (assistant physician) at the Imperial and Royal Foundling Hospital and at the General Hospital, positions he held until March 1852. He then became works physician at an industrial plant in Gaming in Lower Austria, and in November 1854 he was appointed physician to the Benedictine monastery and its boarding school in Kremsmünster, Upper Austria. In 1875, while visiting Randegg near Gaming, where his wife had inherited property, he suffered a serious heart ailment that forced him to give up his post in Kremsmünster and apply for early retirement. From then on he lived in Randegg, where he died on 23 April 1884 at nearby Mitterberg. A biographical account associated with the Upper Austrian Landesmuseum gives his death as 24 April 1884 and stresses that his retirement to Randegg followed a serious heart condition diagnosed earlier that year. During his student years in Prague, Poetsch became close to the philosopher Augustin Smetana and, through him, to Franz Serafin Exner; according to Wurzbach, these contacts and Poetsch's intensive, annotated reading of Bernard Bolzano's treatise Athanasia played an important part in shaping his intellectual outlook.
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