SEVENTEENTH AND EIGHTEENTH CENTURIES 145 



of interest with that dealing with the discovery which he rightly regarded as 

 his greatest contribution to the development of anatomy. Consequently he 

 must have been extremely chagrined to find at the very start a competitor for 

 the honour of having made the great discovery — a youth into the bargain, 

 without any previous successes to his credit, either scholarly or literary. 



Olof Rudbeck was born at Vasteras in 1630, the youngest but one of 

 eleven children. His father was the imperious Bishop Johannes Rudbeckius, 

 a man of deep learning, great powers of leadership, and corresponding am- 

 bition. In his diocese he had founded a college, which, as far as education 

 was concerned, could compete with the University. It possessed both a 

 library and a botanical garden. There young Olof received a thorough edu- 

 cation, and there too he undoubtedly acquired that love for natural science 

 which induced him, immediately after his entry into the University, to take 

 up the study of medicine, which was at that time in not very high favour. 

 Having matriculated at the age of seventeen, he felt himself at once moved to 

 begin to work on his own account, which the poorly equipped faculty of 

 medicine rendered it absolutely necessary to do. Like Vesalius, he devoted 

 himself to the dissecting of animals and in doing so was initiated almost at 

 once into the then newly-discovered and interesting chyle system. The obser- 

 vations which he had made within a very short time in this field created such 

 a sensation that Queen Christina herself desired to become acquainted with 

 them. In 1651 young Rudbeck was given an opportunity of demonstrating 

 his experiments before the Queen and as a reward was given a grant to enable 

 him to travel abroad. Before starting he published his observations in the 

 form of a dissertation, in the year 1553, and then went to Leyden, where he 

 studied for three years. When he returned home, he was appointed professor 

 of anatomy and now devoted himself with great energy to reforming the 

 system of medical education, which had till then consisted mostly of lectures 

 on the writings of the ancient authorities. Rudbeck built after his own de- 

 sign a splendid anatomical theatre, which still exists, and there carried out, 

 as often as material was available, dissections of human bodies. Exercises of 

 this kind had never been seen before in Upsala and they consequently aroused 

 bitter opposition, but Rudbeck did not allow himself to be deterred; on the 

 contrary, he openly showed his contempt for his opponents' prejudices. To 

 ridicule them he once caused the remains of a criminal which he had dissected 

 to be buried with great pomp and drew up for the ceremony a program in 

 which he delightfully parodied the academical rhetoric of the period. How- 

 ever, this educational work made too great demands on even his extraordi- 

 nary energy to allow him time for scientific research; a book on general 

 animal anatomy which he intended to publish was — undoubtedly to the 

 immense loss of science — never written. His childhood's interest in botany 

 bore fruit, for he devoted much of his time to the production of a large 



