Anton Ferdinand Franz Karsch (19 June 1822 – 15 March 1892) was a German physician, botanist, microbiologist, cell biologist and natural philosopher. He served as a privy medical councilor in Westphalia.
Karsch was born in Münster, the son of a court secretary, and received his early education locally. He went to the University of Greifswald in 1842 and received a doctorate in philosophy with a dissertation titled “De quorundam Limnaeorum evolutione" in 1846 and a medical degree with a dissertation titled "De capilliti humani coloribus quaedam". He completed in habilitation at Bonn in 1847 and became a lecturer. In 1948 he became a general practitioner in Münster while also giving lectures. He became a full professor in 1858 and in 1874 he became a member of the medical council. He took an interest in natural history and translated some of Aristotle's works and published on the botany of Westphalia. Karsch wrote in the interdisciplinary journal “Natur und Offenbarung” which he helped found and edit from its inception in 1855, writing both on nature and philosophy. He began to study living forms under the microscope, writing about the life of a gnat in 1855, describing microscopic structures of insects and plants. He examined the stomata of leaves and suggested that they might be the point of entry for plant pathogens. He also suggested that plant cells might be able to communicate with each other to respond to microbial infections using the intercellular spaces in an 1855 note on potato diseases.
Karsch married Maria Haack and they had a son Ferdinand Franz Anton Karsch (1853-1936) who was also a zoologist and paleontologist who served as a curator at the Natural History Museum in Berlin and worked on gall midges and spiders. He also wrote on sexual behaviour in humans and animals under the name Ferdinand Karsch-Haack.
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Die Flora der Provinz Westfalen (1867)