Franz Joseph Schelver (24 July 1778 in Osnabrück – 30 November 1832 in Heidelberg) was a German physician and botanist.

He studied medicine at the University of Jena, and later obtained his doctorate at the University of Göttingen (1798). In 1801 he qualified as a lecturer at the University of Halle, then from 1803 to 1806, worked as an associate professor at Jena. Afterwards, he was named a full professor of medicine at the University of Heidelberg, where from 1811 to 1827, he served as head of the botanical garden.^[1] He was a devotee of the "nature-philosophy" espoused by Friedrich Schelling and Lorenz Oken.^[2]

The plant genus Schelveria (Nees, 1827; family Scrophulariaceae) is probably named after him, although its etymology is seemingly unknown.^[3]

Early on, he maintained an interest in entomology, and published a number of treatises on the subject in Rudolf Wiedemann's Archiv für Zoologie und Zootomie. In 1798 he was the author of a book on the sense organs of insects and worms, titled Versuch einer Naturgeschichte der Sinneswerkzeuge bei den Insecten und Würmern.^[2] In the areas of nature philosophy, medicine and botany, he published the following:

• Elementarlehre der organischen Natur, first part Organomie, 1800 – Elementary instruction on organic nature; organomics.
• Philosophie der Medizin, 1809 – The philosophy of medicine.
• Kritik der Lehre von den Geschlechtern der Pflanze, (1812, two sequels in 1814 and 1823) – Criticism of the doctrine on the sexes of plants.
• Von der Sexualität der Planzen: Studien (with August Wilhelm Henschel) 1820 – On the sexuality of plants.
• Lebens- und Formgeschichte der Pflanzenwelt (volume 1), 1822 – Life and form history of the plant world.^[4]