This monograph offers the first comprehensive treatment of the multi-faceted scholarly interests of Ole Worm, professor of medicine at the University of Copenhagen. Scholarship about Worm has focused mainly on Worm’s collecting and the creation of his cabinet of curiosity, the Museum Wormianum, resulting in Worm’s rationale for his research being largely overlooked. Worm shared his many interests with a number of other physicians of the age, but in terms of breadth, few matched the variety of his concerns. For a man who considered himself first and foremost a physician and anatomist, his interests in Paracelsianism and collecting can at times be baffling, while his interests in antiquarianism, runes, and chronology strike the modern reader as at odds with his medical and natural philosophical interests. It is important to comprehend that Worm’s multi-faceted interests in the created world were underpinned by his Lutheran, Melanchthonian natural philosophy, and this served to unify all Worm’s scholarly undertakings, inquiries, and experiments in the single aim of reaching a better understanding of God’s creation, the Book of Nature.

This book presents a new interpretation of how and why the discovery of the circulation of the blood in animals was made. It has long been known that the English physician William Harvey (1578–1657) was a follower of Aristotle, but his most strikingly ‘modern’ and original discovery – of the circulation of the blood – resulted from Harvey following Aristotle’s ancient programme of investigation into animals. This is a new reading of the most important discovery ever made in anatomy by one man and produces not only a radical re-reading of Harvey as anatomist, but also of Aristotle and his investigations of animals.

Renaissance anatomist Gabrielle Falloppia is best known today for his account of the eponymous fallopian tubes but he made numerous other anatomical discoveries as well, was one of the most famous surgeons of his time, and is widely believed to have invented the condom. Drawing on Falloppia's Observationes anatomicae of 1561 and on dozens of handwritten and published sets of student notes, this book not only looks at Falloppia’s anatomical lectures and demonstrations. It also studies Falloppia’s work on surgical topics – including the French disease and cosmetic surgery – on thermal waters, and on pharmacology. Last but not least, it uses student notes and the letters of contemporary scholars to throw a new light on Falloppia’s biography, on his very special relationship with the botanist Melchior Wieland, who lived in his house for several years, and on his conflicts with his fellow professors in Padua, one of whom, Bassiano Landi, was murdered just ten days after his funeral – by Falloppia’s disciples, as some believed. Written by one of the leading scholars in the field of early modern medicine, this book will appeal to all those interested in the teaching and practice of anatomy, surgery, and pharmacology in the Renaissance.

Winner of the Third Neu-Whitrow Prize (2021) granted by the Commission on Bibliography and Documentation of IUHPS-DHST Additional background information This book provides bibliographic information, ownership records, a detailed worldwide census and a description of the handwritten annotations for all the surviving copies of the 1543 and 1555 editions of Vesalius’ De humani corporis fabrica. It also offers a groundbreaking historical analysis of how the Fabrica traveled across the globe, and how readers studied, annotated and critiqued its contents from 1543 to 2017. The Fabrica of Andreas Vesalius sheds a fresh light on the book’s vibrant reception history and documents how physicians, artists, theologians and collectors filled its pages with copious annotations. It also offers a novel interpretation of how an early anatomical textbook became one of the most coveted rare books for collectors in the 21st century.

This volume is the first to adopt systematically a comparative approach to the role of ancient texts and traditions in early modern scholarship, science, medicine, and theology. It offers a new method for understanding early modern knowledge.

First published in 2004.Athanasius Kircher (1602-1680) -- German Jesuit, occultist, polymath - was one of most curious figures in the history of science. He dabbled in all the mysteries of his time: the heavenly bodies, sound amplification, museology, botany, Asian languages, the pyramids of Egypt -- almost anything incompletely understood. Kircher coined the term electromagnetism, printed Sanskrit for the first time in a Western book, and built a famous museum collection. His wild, beautifully illustrated books are sometimes visionary, frequently wrong, and yet compelling documents in the history of ideas. They are being rediscovered in our own time. This volume contains new essays on Kircher and his world by leading historians and historians of science, including Stephen Jay Gould, Ingrid Rowland, Anthony Grafton, Daniel Stoltzenberg, Paula Findlen, and Barbara Stafford.-

The conviction that Nature was God's second revelation played a crucial role in early modern Dutch culture. This book offers a fascinating account on how Dutch intellectuals contemplated, investigated, represented and collected natural objects, and how the notion of the 'Book of Nature' was transformed.