When he was not granted a license to practice in Transylvania with his Leipzig degree, he worked as a general practitioner in Chemnitz.

[1] He would routinely collect samples in the morning before work, then study his accumulation in the evening.

He also was gifted a microscope and a small library, courtesy of Johann Christian Daniel von Schreber.

He was less successful with other sporophytes, being unable to determine the life cycles of ferns or fungi, but he did make useful observations on the algae Chara and Spirogyra and he made it clear that he was not the first to get new plants from sowing the spores of mosses, David Meese having done it before him.

It was here that he published his first major work, the two volume Fundamentum historiae naturalis muscorum frondosorum in 1782.

[9] Hedwig's personal herbarium was auctioned off in 1810, but it was largely acquired by the Botanical Garden of Geneva, where the collection is still located today.