Valentin Rose (classicist)

Valentin Rose was the son of mineralogist Gustav Rose (1798–1873), and a nephew to famed mineralogist Heinrich Rose (1795–1864) and to the pharmacist Wilhelm Rose (1792–1867), of whom he published a brief remembrance (Berlin 1867). His great-grandfather was pharmacologist Valentin Rose the Elder (1736–1771), and his grandfather was Valentin Rose the Younger (1762–1807), who was also a noted pharmacologist. His younger brother was the surgeon Edmund Rose. In August 1872 he married Marie Poggendorff, the daughter of Johann Christian Poggendorff.

Rose received his doctorate from the Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität in Berlin in 1854. In 1855, he took a post at the Royal Library at Berlin, where he remained until his retirement in 1905. Under his leadership, the library's Manuscript Department (which he headed from 1886), gained a leading international reputation. He published catalogs of the collection between 1893 and 1905, and among the important discoveries made were texts in the history of medicine and in horticulture.