Unknown author · Public domain

Marcus Elieser Bloch practiced as a physician in Berlin while pursuing a parallel passion for natural history, assembling one of the era's largest fish collections and publishing a multivolume catalog illustrating fish species from around the world. Raised in a Hebrew-speaking Jewish family before learning German and Latin as an adult, he built his scientific career from a late and unconventional start, and is generally considered one of the most important ichthyologists of the 18th century.