Carroll William Dodge

Carroll William Dodge (January 20, 1895 – July 21, 1988) was an American mycologist and lichenologist.

His major field of study were human and mammalian parasitic fungus, lichen associated fungus and fungi forming subterranean sporophores. (1)

Carroll William Dodge was born in Danby, Vermont. He started his early education from Burr and Burton Seminaries in Manchester, Vermont. He went to Middlebury College at Vermont to study classical language and there he received his Artium Baccalaureus in 1915 and completed his master's in 1916. During his stay at Middlebury, he came in contact with Edward Angus Burt (1859-1939) who was another mycologist, today known as an authority of terrestrial fungi, Thelephoraceae (2). Carroll was inspired by Angus Burt and his interest grew in biology and followed Burt to Washington University at St. Louis, Missouri as Lachland Fellow. He was so interested in botany that he left Rhodes scholarship to Oxford University, withdrew his nomination and went to Washington University and did his doctorate. He did his PhD in plant physiology and biochemistry under Benjamin M. Duggar in 1918 (1).

After his PhD, he served in US Army as a specialist in Office of Nutrition, Camp Pevon, Massachusetts during 1918-1919. After one year of service in the US Army, he worked as an associated chemist in Dairy Division of United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) (1).

He again joined back to academia in 1919 as an instructor in Botany at Brown University, Rhode Island and took class in phycology. There he became Onley Assistant Professor of Botany and finally he entered Harvard in 1921 as an instructor in Botany and became assistant professor and Curator of Farlow Library of Herbarium in 1924. He doubled the herbarium collection during his stay in the library by purchasing adding from his own collection (1). Today, he is considered as one of the important collector of lichen in Farlow Library of Herbarium (3). During his stay in Harvard, from mid 1920s he started studying fungal diseases in human and collected a lot of information such that he offered the first course in Medical Mycology in America. In 1931, he became professor of Botany at Washington University. He finally retired in 1963. During his stay in Washington University at St. Louis he visited Latin American Countries; Panama, Costa Rica, Guatemala, Chile and Brazil and taught several courses in medical mycology and lichenology in those countries. His interest in human pathogenic fungi lead to the publication of a very popular book “Medical mycology” in 1935 (1).

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