Death Defied: The Anatomy Lessons of Frederik Ruysch

Death Defied

History of Science and Medicine Library VOLUME 18

Death Defied The Anatomy Lessons of Frederik Ruysch

By

Luuc Kooijmans Translated by

Diane Webb

LEIDEN • BOSTON 2011

On the cover: Portrait of Frederik Ruysch by Jurriaan Pool, 1702 (Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, Rotterdam). This book was originally published in Dutch by the Nederlands Tijdschrift voor Geneeskunde (Netherlands Journal of Medicine), Bohn Stafleu van Loghum, in 2004. Grateful acknowledgement is made to the Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research (NWO) for the financial support that made this translation possible. This book is printed on acid-free paper. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Kooijmans, L. [Doodskunstenaar. English] Death defied : the anatomy lessons of Frederik Ruysch / by Luuc Kooijmans ; translated by Diane Webb. p. cm. — (History of science and medicine library, ISSN 1872-0684 ; v. 18) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-90-04-18784-9 (hardback : alk. paper) 1. Ruysch, Frederik, 1638–1731. 2. Anatomists—Netherlands—Biography. I. Title. II. Series: History of science and medicine library ; v. 18. [DNLM: 1. Ruysch, Frederik, 1638–1731. 2. Anatomists—Netherlands—Biography. 3. Anatomy—history—Netherlands. 4. History, 17th Century—Netherlands. 5. History, 18th Century—Netherlands. WZ 100] QM16.R89K6613 2010 611.0092—dc22 [B] 2010036399

ISSN 1872-0684 ISBN 978 90 04 18784 9 Copyright 2011 by Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, The Netherlands. Koninklijke Brill NV incorporates the imprints Brill, Hotei Publishing, IDC Publishers, Martinus Nijhoff Publishers and VSP. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, translated, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without prior written permission from the publisher. Authorization to photocopy items for internal or personal use is granted by Koninklijke Brill NV provided that the appropriate fees are paid directly to The Copyright Clearance Center, 222 Rosewood Drive, Suite 910, Danvers, MA 01923, USA. Fees are subject to change.

CONTENTS List of Figures ...................................................................................... Prologue in St Petersburg ..................................................................

ix xiii

Chapter One The Anatomy Lesson .............................................. Apothecary’s Apprentice ............................................................... Anatomical Knowledge ................................................................. Heroes .............................................................................................. Examination .................................................................................... Family ............................................................................................... Louis de Bils .................................................................................... Discoveries ....................................................................................... Idle Boasting .................................................................................... Vivisection ....................................................................................... Descartes .......................................................................................... Research ........................................................................................... Preservation ..................................................................................... Secret Formulas .............................................................................. Doctorate ......................................................................................... Confrontation with De Bils ..........................................................

1 2 6 10 15 16 18 23 25 32 37 41 44 46 50 52

Chapter Two Established and Envied .......................................... 61 Appointment in Amsterdam ........................................................ 62 Medical Bastions ............................................................................. 65 An Established Anatomist ............................................................ 71 Hardened Wax ................................................................................ 73 Research ........................................................................................... 76 Professorship ................................................................................... 78 Anatomy Lesson ............................................................................. 81 Intellectuals in Power .................................................................... 85 Midwifery ......................................................................................... 88 Opposition ....................................................................................... 95 Gluttonous Tipplers ....................................................................... 100

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Chapter Three Under Fire .............................................................. Accusations ...................................................................................... Intimidation .................................................................................... Opposing Ruysch ........................................................................... A Nobody ........................................................................................ New Knowledge, Old Certainties ................................................ The Insolvent Estate ....................................................................... Radical Supporters .........................................................................

109 109 118 121 127 134 137 142

Chapter Four Ruysch at Work ...................................................... The Surgeons’ Guild ....................................................................... The Battle for Bodies ..................................................................... The Amsterdam Hortus Botanicus .............................................. The House on the Bloemgracht ................................................... A Private Museum ......................................................................... Idle Inventions ................................................................................ Surgery ............................................................................................. The Workplace ................................................................................

149 149 153 159 165 176 184 192 199

Chapter Five Rivals ......................................................................... Perfection ......................................................................................... Rivalry .............................................................................................. King Stupidity ................................................................................. Discrediting Rivals ......................................................................... Malice Aforethought ...................................................................... Peter the Great in Amsterdam ..................................................... From Brain to Scrotum ................................................................. Stone-cutting ................................................................................... Ruysch, Rau and Bidloo ................................................................

207 207 213 220 228 236 241 253 260 265

Chapter Six The Collection ............................................................ Capriccio Anatomico ...................................................................... Specimens ........................................................................................ Animals ............................................................................................ Wonders ........................................................................................... The Republic of Letters ................................................................. Lessons ............................................................................................. Deceit ................................................................................................ Visitors ............................................................................................. Physico-theology .............................................................................

269 270 279 285 292 295 300 306 310 317

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Chapter Seven The Return of Peter the Great ............................ Collection for Sale .......................................................................... A Return Visit ................................................................................. Secret ................................................................................................ The Collection Moves East ...........................................................

321 322 329 334 341

Chapter Eight Reproduction .......................................................... Rachel ............................................................................................... A Dutiful Father ............................................................................. Hendrik Ruysch’s Lessons in Obstetrics .................................... The Placenta .................................................................................... The Shaft .......................................................................................... The Development of the Embryo ................................................ The Mystery of Reproduction ......................................................

347 347 350 355 361 366 371 376

Chapter Nine Latter Days .............................................................. Approaching Death ........................................................................ Late Work ........................................................................................ Discussion with Boerhaave ........................................................... Plant Anatomy ................................................................................ Final Work ...................................................................................... Father and Son ................................................................................

385 385 387 393 401 405 410

Chapter Ten Ruysch’s Legacy ........................................................ Possible Successors ......................................................................... Broken Hip ...................................................................................... The Estate ......................................................................................... Tradition versus Enlightenment: Titsingh and Ulhoorn ......... Biography ......................................................................................... The Secret ........................................................................................ The Preparations in the Kunstkamera ........................................

413 414 422 427 431 433 436 440

Bibliography ......................................................................................... 449 Index ..................................................................................................... 465

LIST OF FIGURES Fig. 1 Fig. 2 Fig. 3 Fig. 4 Fig. 5

Fig. 6 Fig. 7 Fig. 8

Fig. 9

Fig. 10 Fig. 11 Fig. 12 Fig. 13 Fig. 14 Fig. 15 Fig. 16

Depiction by R. van Persijn of a dog dissected by De Bils. ............................................................................. Frans DeleBoë, alias Franciscus Sylvius (1614–1672). .................................................................... Jan van Horne (1621–1670). ........................................ Reinier de Graaf (1641–1673). ..................................... a) Depiction by Frederik Ruysch of the lymph vessels. .......................................................................... b) Illustration from Frederik Ruysch’s collected work of the valves in the lymph vessels of a horse liver. ............................................................................. The Anatomy Lesson of Frederik Ruysch by Adriaan Backer, 1670. ................................................................... Portrait of Gerard Blaes (‘Blasius’), 1625–1692. ........ The Collegium Medicum, including Bonaventura van Dortmond and Egbert Veen. Painting by Adriaan Backer, 1683. .................................................... The officers of the surgeons’ guild, including Jan Coenerding, Govert Bidloo and Allard Cyprianus, 1679/1680, by Nicolaas Maas. ...................................... The Anatomy Lesson of Frederik Ruysch by Jan van Neck, 1683. ...................................................................... Portrait of Jan Commelin (1629–1692) by Gerard Hoet. ................................................................... A painting by Rachel Ruysch of fruit and butterflies. ........................................................................ Portrait of Frederik Ruysch by Jurriaan Pool, 1694. .................................................................................. Portrait of Frederik Ruysch by Jurriaan Pool, 1702. .................................................................................. A painting by Anna Ruysch of fruit and butterflies. ........................................................................ A watercolour of a pineapple from the hortus botanicus, by Jan Munnicks. .........................................

28 36 40 47 53

54 84 124

138

150 152 162 169 171 172 173 175

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Fig. 17 Instruments used in lithotomy (stone-cutting), from Heelkundige onderwijzingen by Lorenz Heister, edited by Hendrik Ulhoorn. ..................................................... Fig. 18 Illustration of a vagina with hymen from Hondert anatomische en chirurgicaale aanmerkingen,1690. ....... Fig. 19 The Nieuwe Markt (New Market) with the Weigh House, after renovation. .................................................... Fig. 20 Design for the entrance of the anatomical theatre in the Weigh House, with the bust of Hippocrates and the inscription Huc Tendimus Omnes. .......................... Fig. 21 Ruysch’s coat of arms. ....................................................... Fig. 22 Interior of the anatomical theatre (Amsterdam City Archives). ............................................................................. Fig. 23 Johan Jakob Rau (1668–1719). ......................................... Fig. 24 Portrait of Govert Bidloo from his anatomical atlas, Anatomia humani corporis (Amsterdam, 1685). .......... Fig. 25 Engraving after a drawing by Gerard de Lairesse from Anatomia humani corporis, Bidloo’s anatomical atlas. ...................................................................................... Fig. 26 Portrait of Nicolaas Witsen (1641–1717), 1677. ............ Fig. 27 Peter the Great’s entry in Frederik Ruysch’s guestbook. ............................................................................ Fig. 28 The head of a young man Frederik Ruysch had embalmed. .............................................................................. Fig. 29 Frontispiece of Alle de ontleed-, genees- en heelkundige werken, executed by Cornelis Huijberts, showing an idealized museum interior. ............................................... Fig. 30 Anatomical composition from Het eerste anatomische cabinet of Frederik Ruysch, illustrated by Cornelis Huijberts (1701). ................................................................. Fig. 31 Eyelids and child’s arm. .................................................... Fig. 32 Child’s head in a glass jar. ................................................ Fig. 33 Child’s head in a glass jar. ................................................ Fig. 34 Child’s head from the collection of the Kunstkamera in St Petersburg. ................................................................. Fig. 35 Hand holding vulva, from the collection of Leiden University. ............................................................................ Fig. 36 Child’s lower leg and a scorpion, before (left) and after (right) the conservation treatment carried out in St Petersburg. .................................................................

198 200 201

203 204 205 219 221

226 243 247 254

271

275 276 277 277 281 284

286

list of figures Fig. 37 Depiction of decorated glass jars from Het eerste cabinet der dieren. The jar on the left contains an armadillo the size of a little finger, with a twig of ficoides from the Cape of Good Hope. The jar on the right contains a bird from Ceylon, perched on a thistle. ................................................................................ Fig. 38 Depiction of decorated glass jars from Het eerste cabinet der dieren. Engraving by Josef Mulder, 1710. The jar on the left contains a fish caught near Ceylon (A) and a sea nettle (B). The composition decorating the lid features a Moluccan fish (E). The jar on the right contains part of a child’s arm. ................................ Fig. 39 Depiction of a pipa americana from Het eerste cabinet der dieren. ............................................................................ Fig. 40 An opened skull (one of Ruysch’s preparations). Colour illustration by Johannes Ladmiral. ..................... Fig. 41 Depiction of a penis from Hondert anatomische en chirurgicaale aanmerkingen (One hundred anatomical and surgical observations), 1690. ..................................... Fig. 42 Depiction by Cornelis Huijberts of very small skeletons, from Het zesde anatomische cabinet. ............ Fig. 43 Portrait of the elderly Ruysch, by Jan Wandelaar. ....... Fig. 44 Vessels in the glands of the mesentery. .......................... Fig. 45 Portrait of Herman Boerhaave (1668–1738), by Jan Wandelaar. ........................................................................... Fig. 46 The skeleton of a pear, by J. Folkema, from De laatste oefeningen van Frederik Ruysch. ...................................... Fig. 47 Portraits of Lorenz Heister and Hendrik Ulhoorn on the title page of Ulhoorn’s edition of Heister’s Heelkundige onderwijzingen, by Pieter Tanjé, 1739. .... Fig. 48 Hands holding organs, from the collection of the Kunstkamera in St Petersburg. ........................................ Fig. 49 Foetus in a hand, from the collection of the Kunstkamera in St Petersburg (Rosamond Purcell). ... Fig. 50 A foetus in a glass jar, before (left) and after (right) conservation treatment in St Petersburg. ....................... Fig. 51 A three-hundred-year-old foetus from Ruysch’s collection, undergoing conservation treatment in St Petersburg (Willem J. Mulder). ...................................

xi

289

291 301 308

369 375 391 398 400 403

417 444 445 447

448

PROLOGUE IN ST PETERSBURG In the autumn of 2003 the Dutch crown prince, Willem Alexander, visited the three-hundred-year-old city of St Petersburg. One of the scheduled activities was a visit to the recently opened exhibition of the anatomical collection in the Kunstkamera, because it consisted largely of specimens prepared by the Dutch anatomist Frederik Ruysch. This part of the programme was cancelled at the last minute, however, to spare the prince—whose wife was expecting their first child—the sight of the macabre, deformed foetuses that Ruysch had preserved in alcohol three hundred years earlier. That the visit to the anatomical collection had been scheduled at all was described as highly inappropriate—an embarrassing slip-up. If Frederik Ruysch had heard this, he would have turned in his grave. Not that he would have been surprised to hear that his preparations had survived three centuries, for he would have expected nothing less. Nor would he have been astonished to find a prince taking an interest in his work. He was certainly used to that. But he would have been dismayed to hear his specimens described as macabre, since it was precisely the beauty of his preparations—which never failed to arouse feelings of wonder and tenderness—that earned Ruysch long-lasting fame. For centuries, friend and foe alike have agreed that he should be credited, above all, with making anatomy an acceptable pursuit. At the beginning of Honoré de Balzac’s 1831 novel La Peau de Chagrin (The Wild Ass’s Skin), the young protagonist is wandering around Paris, planning to put an end to his life, when he decides to go into a curiosity shop. There he encounters an ‘enchanting creature’, the embalmed body of a child, which reminds him of his happy boyhood. This ‘sleeping’ child turns out to be a remnant of the collection of Frederik Ruysch, who had been dead for exactly a century when Balzac wrote this novel. Before this, in 1824, the Italian author Giacomo Leopardi had based one of his Operette morali (Moral Essays) on the famous anatomist. In ‘The Dialogue of Frederik Ruysch and His Mummies’, Ruysch is awakened at midnight by his cadavers, who have come to life in his studio and are singing in chorus. They declare that death, the fate of all living things, has brought them peace. For them, life is but a memory,

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and although they are not happy, at least they are free of old sorrows and fears. Ruysch, watching through a crack in the door, exclaims, ‘Good heavens! Who on earth taught music to these dead people, who are crowing like roosters in the middle of the night? I’m in a cold sweat and almost more dead than they are. I didn’t realize that just because I saved them from decay they would come back to life.’ He then enters his studio and says, ‘Children, what kind of game are you playing? Have you forgotten that you’re dead? What’s this racket all about? Has the tsar’s visit gone to your head?’ One of the dead tells Ruysch that they can speak for a quarter of an hour, so he asks them for a brief description of what they felt when they were at death’s door. They assure him that dying is like falling asleep, like a dissolving of consciousness, and not at all painful.1 Frederik Ruysch died in 1731. Forty years later the French professor Antoine Portal published a six-volume history of anatomy and surgery in which he described Ruysch as ‘one of the greatest observers of our century’, a man who had practised anatomy with great passion.2 Portal credited Ruysch with bringing about significant advances in science, not only because he had written such meticulous accounts of his anatomical discoveries but, most notably, because he had perfected the art of preservation. More than a century after Ruysch’s death, the Belgian professor Adolphe Burggraeve devoted a long chapter to him in his Histoire de l’anatomie, in which he praised Ruysch for raising the art of embalming to an unparalleled degree of perfection. This had been a boon to science, for until the mid-seventeenth century, the study of human tissue had been hampered by rapid decomposition. Ruysch, however, had pushed back the boundaries of research by developing a method of preservation that gave a corpse the appearance of a living being. Having relieved anatomy of the repulsion generally aroused by cadavers, he then succeeded in turning his anatomical collection into a popular tourist attraction. According to Burggraeve, Ruysch’s example had inspired others to form collections which, in the mid-nineteenth century, were still the glory of Dutch universities.3 1 Giacomo Leopardi, ‘Dialogo di Federico Ruysch e delle sue mummie’, in Poesie e Prose, vol. 2, 116-122, esp. 117 (Mondadori, Milan, 1988). 2 Portal, Antoine, Histoire de l’anatomie et de la chirurgie, 7 vols., Paris, 1770–1773; III, 267. 3 Burggraeve, Histoire de l’anatomie physiologique, pathologique et philosophique (Paris 1880), 590. Charles Daremberg (1817–1872), a positivist in the spirit of Comte, wrote about Ruysch in his Histoire des sciences médicales (1870): ‘He was not only a demonstrator, but a demonstrator of genius, a man driven by passion, patience, perspicacity,

prologue in st petersburg

xv

The scientific significance of Ruysch’s work was later overshadowed by technological advancement, but his specimens continued to appeal to the imagination. His work was increasingly viewed as art and compared to the work of his daughter, the famous painter Rachel Ruysch. Even today, artists, playwrights and musicians look to Ruysch for inspiration. In 2000 the photographer Scott Wilson put together an online exhibition based on Ruysch’s work. The year before, Hilary Bell, an Australian playwright, composed The Anatomy Lesson of Doctor Ruysch, a musical in which Ruysch presents his collection to Peter the Great. Stephen Jay Gould and the photographer Rosamond Purcell devoted the first chapter of their book Finders, Keepers: Eight Collectors to Ruysch.4 The writers and artists who were inspired by Frederik Ruysch’s work all had their own ideas about the man and what motivated him, since little was known about his life. Nineteenth-century authors took their information on Ruysch from the only two available sources: the introduction to the 1744 edition of his collected works and a short biography written by Bernard le Bovier de Fontenelle, the celebrated secretary of the Paris Académie des Sciences. Frederik Ruysch was therefore a mythic figure, known mainly for his ability to embalm a child’s body so perfectly that it seemed to be merely sleeping. Peter the Great, on his visit to Ruysch’s museum, famously knelt down to kiss one such embalmed child. Years later, he bought Ruysch’s entire anatomical collection and had it shipped to St Petersburg. By the mid-nineteenth century no one knew for sure what had happened to that collection, but it was assumed that little of it had survived. Rumours abounded. It was suggested that the specimens had not even arrived intact, because during the voyage to St Petersburg, the sailors had guzzled the preservative alcohol. Once published, that anecdote became an obligatory part of every piece written about Ruysch. In the days when St Petersburg was called Leningrad, this myth and other misunderstandings that had begun to circulate about Ruysch himself could thrive unchallenged, thus lending them an aura of truth.

a sensitivity which has perhaps never been equalled in the sciences. It was said that Ruysch had the eyes of a lynx and the fingers of a fairy’ (quoted in Daniels and Israels, Verdiensten). 4 Stephen J. Gould and Rosamond Purcell, Finders, Keepers: Eight Collectors (London 1992).

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Debunking a myth requires research. Sometimes it is easy: one glance at a recent inventory of St Petersburg’s Kunstkamera reveals that of the nearly one thousand extant specimens prepared by Ruysch, only eleven actually display abnormalities.5 Often, though, it is more difficult to separate fact from fiction. Frederik Ruysch was well aware of this. He spent a large part of his life battling stubborn superstitions, outmoded ideas, ungrounded generalities and fashionable speculations. Believing only his own eyes, he took pride in being able to prove his assertions. Those who doubted him were invariably told to come and see for themselves.

5

Radziun, ‘De anatomische collectie’, 53.

CHAPTER ONE

THE ANATOMY LESSON When Frederik Ruysch was born in The Hague on 28 March 1638, the Dutch Revolt—the Eighty Years’ War against Spain—was entering its final decade. The fighting had taken place far from his home, but when he was ten, he witnessed the festivities held to celebrate the longawaited independence of the Dutch Republic. For a boy of Frederik’s age, The Hague held plenty of attractions: it was the seat of government, where the Princes of Orange held court, and there was much coming and going of foreign diplomats and military men. One could spend all day gaping at their sumptuous attire and splendid carriages, and every day brought news from the rest of the world. The news was mostly about politics, but there were often reports of amazing discoveries taking place in far-off lands. For decades the Dutch—following in the wake of the Spanish and the Portuguese— had been sailing to East Asia and South America to establish colonies and conduct trade. Almost by accident, however, the voyagers had discovered unexplored territories with unknown peoples whose customs and traditions surprised—and sometimes shocked—Europeans. When Frederik Ruysch was a boy, Abel Tasman, who had been sent by the Dutch East India Company to map the lands south of the Indian archipelago, discovered a large island, which he named Van Diemensland, after his superior. News of such discoveries spread not only by word of mouth, but also through letters, newspapers, periodicals, pamphlets and books. The Hague was one of the few places in Europe where books were produced on a large scale. The publications appearing during those years of discovery included a history of the Dutch West India Company, a collection of travellers’ accounts of the East Indies, and the journal of the Dutch sea captain Willem Ysbrantsz Bontekoe. The experiences of English, French, German, Spanish and Portuguese travellers were also published, giving more and more people the opportunity to learn about previously unknown parts of the world. The exotic objects the travellers brought back—artefacts from other cultures, as well as flora and fauna—were viewed with great interest.

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It was finally possible to see animals previously known only from travellers’ tales, such as parrots, chameleons and armadillos. There was a brisk trade in monkeys and exotic birds, the seeds of rare plants, and unusual shells and stones. Such rarities were collected both for pleasure and out of a desire to catalogue everything in existence. The seemingly far-fetched stories about distant places resulted in a demand for evidence. Collections proved instrumental in satisfying this need to create order out of chaos. Apothecary’s Apprentice One collector of curiosities was the young Frederik Ruysch, who had become an apothecary’s apprentice, even though that was not the most obvious choice of profession for one of his background. A number of his ancestors had studied law, and nearly all of his closest relatives were lawyers and civil servants. When the Protestants seized power in 1578, his great-grandfather, Ruysch Claesz, was appointed pensionary of Amsterdam (spokesman for the city at the meetings of the provincial government), a post he held for six years, after which he moved to The Hague to take up the office of public prosecutor for the province of Holland. Frederik’s grandfather, Gijsbert Ruysch, had started out as a notary and clerk for the States of Holland (the provincial government), but in 1608 he became secretary of the recently established Court of Audit. Hoping to give his sons a livelihood, he began to acquaint them with his work when they were still quite young. His two eldest sons soon obtained positions as registry clerks at the States General (the parliament to which each province sent representatives), while the third became a clerk at the States of Holland. Gijsbert Ruysch became a prosperous man, wealthy enough to buy a fine house in an exclusive street in The Hague. But just as he was preparing to move into it—in the spring of 1624—he fell ill, in all likelihood a victim of the plague epidemic that struck The Hague that year. When he realized he was dying, he asked the States General for assurances that his eldest son would be allowed to succeed him as secretary of the Court of Audit. This would give the family some measure of security by safeguarding their income and social standing. It was also advantageous from the government’s point of view, since there was no formal course of training for civil servants, so practical training under paternal supervision was a common way of ensuring continuity

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in government. Gijsbert Ruysch’s request, which was not unusual, was readily granted. As soon as he heard the news, he summoned a notary to draw up his last will and testament.1 Ten days later he died. In The Hague his death did not go unnoticed. A schoolmaster composed a sonnet to mark his death, and the letter that the diplomat and man of letters Constantijn Huygens received from his mother the following week also contained the news: ‘Secretary Ruysch died; his son has the office, and the youngest son has taken up his brother’s post.’2 Unlike his elder brothers, the youngest son—twenty-six-year-old Hendrik Ruysch—was still a bachelor, but his new position gave him the means to provide for a family. The following year he married twentyone-year-old Anna van Berchem, who also came from a family of civil servants. As a clerk his status was more modest than that of his eldest brother, yet he lived in reasonably comfortable circumstances. The clerks at the States General were in daily contact with the court clerk, and had close ties to regents and other public servants—connections that enabled them to supplement their incomes. Hendrik Ruysch thus provided a wide variety of clerical services that earned him a great deal of extra money. When his mother died in 1630 and he received his share of the inheritance, his family’s place in society seemed secure. In 1638, however, everything changed, for shortly after the birth of Frederik, his sixth child, he suddenly died.3 The States General had granted Hendrik Ruysch’s request that his office devolve upon his eldest son. But that son, also named Hendrik, was only eight, and until he was old enough, the office would be filled by a deputy, who naturally pocketed most of the income. The additional loss of the father’s extra earnings meant that the family was forced to live on a fraction of its former income. Frederik Ruysch thus grew up fatherless, with no clear prospects for the future. Frederik’s eldest brother would follow in their father’s footsteps, as soon as he was old enough to assume his office, but another occupation had to be found for Frederik. Fortunately, the family was well-connected: his paternal uncles had good jobs in the Hague bureaucracy,

1

The Hague Municipal Archives, notarial archive 9a, fol. 132, 27 April 1624. See Knevel, Haagse bureau, 75–95. 2 Huygens, Briefwisseling I, 164–165. 3 Shortly before this, on 5 July 1637, his wife’s sister, Querina van Berchem, had married one of his colleagues, Frederik van der Voort.

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though they had their own sons to think of. There were other possibilities, however, particularly in the spheres of local government and health care. A sister of Frederik’s grandfather was married to a wealthy cloth merchant who held a seat on the town council. When he died, his eldest son assumed his seat, and his second son became an apothecary. Aaltje Ruysch, one of Frederik’s aunts, was married to Jan Vonk, a prominent surgeon in The Hague. Vonk had been an officer of the guild and had served as Prince Frederik Hendrik’s personal physician. Another of his aunts, Maria Ruysch, was likewise married to a surgeon, who was not only a guild officer but also a regent of the lunatic asylum and pest-house. Their son, the same age as Frederik Ruysch, was apprenticed to an apothecary. The profession of apothecary was therefore not such a strange choice. Apothecaries were herbalists who kept shops where they sold medicinal remedies, which they compounded according to physicians’ prescriptions. Though subordinate to physicians, the profession of apothecary was a protected one, and—like the surgeons—the apothecaries had their own guild, membership of which required one to follow a course of training and pass an examination. Only guild members were allowed to sell medicines, and so the profession enjoyed a certain standing. Moreover, when Frederik Ruysch began his training, exciting new developments were taking place. Travellers to remote parts of the world regularly returned to Europe with previously unknown herbs and spices. Some were thought to have healing qualities and so became part of the standard assortment of remedies. Apothecaries, who inevitably came into contact with exotic plants, often collected unusual specimens, either as a matter of interest, as stock in trade, or as a means of attracting customers. One of the channels through which exotica were conveyed to Europe was the Dutch West India Company (WIC). The Hague was reminded daily of the WIC’s activities by an impressive house that had been erected in the centre of town for Count Johan Maurits of Nassau. A member of the House of Orange, Maurits had governed, on behalf of the WIC, the Dutch colony in Brazil from 1636 to 1644, and had used his earnings to commission the architect Pieter Post to build him a house in The Hague—a house that Frederik Ruysch had seen under construction as a boy. Frederik’s family had also been directly involved with the WIC. His father’s youngest brother, Nicolaas Ruysch, had gone to Brazil in

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Maurits’s entourage. Nicolaas did not return, so Frederik never met him, but he did become acquainted with a number of others who had taken part in the Brazilian adventure, one of whom was Frans Post, the architect’s younger brother. A painter, Frans had travelled to Brazil to document the indigenous population and local landscape in drawings and paintings.4 Frederik Ruysch was interested in every aspect of the plant kingdom. Identifying plants and knowing their therapeutic properties were essential skills for an apothecary, so he learned to use ‘herbals’— books describing plants and their medicinal uses—and the ‘receipt book’, which contained instructions on how to prepare medicines. And because remedies were based increasingly on chemicals, he also learned to operate furnaces, bellows, coolers, and the vessels and apparatus used in the process of distillation. This, too, was fascinating, but Ruysch later declared that from a young age he had been, above all, a lover of flora. The specimens he collected, beginning with the plants in his immediate surroundings, were dried and kept in a herbarium. He preserved his collection carefully, as evidenced by an inventory drawn up in 1710, which lists flowers picked fifty years earlier.5 When confronted with unknown specimens, plant lovers first attempted to determine their similarities and differences to known plants, which meant investigating their appearance, smell and taste. Ruysch knew that it was necessary to exercise caution, however, for he had once witnessed a tragic accident involving a poisonous plant. A surgeon and a physician had come across an unknown plant in a garden, and were so curious that they had eaten some of the root, whereupon both suffered ‘great bodily pain’. The physician escaped without injury, but the surgeon suffered ‘severe nervous convulsions’ and died.6 Ruysch did not confine his attention to plants, but began to collect other wonders of nature: shells, rocks, insects and even human bones,

4 Later Maurits presented eight landscapes by Frans Post to Louis XIV; they ended up in the collection of the Louvre. 5 AW (Frederik Ruysch, Alle de Werken) 1266. Hans Sloane’s herbarium, which is preserved in the British Museum, contains a ‘herbarium vivum gathered in Holland about 1657 by dr. Fr. Ruysch in which are many fine specimens and varieties of flowers’ (Dandy, Sloane Herbarium, 41). 6 AW 1275.

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thus venturing into the field of anatomy, where the potential for discovery was as great as on any foreign continent. Anatomical Knowledge Not so very long ago, the average Dutchman had looked upon the world as a fairly uncomplicated place. There were far-off lands where heathens lived, but Europe, the centre of the world, was dominated by Christianity, under the leadership of a church which taught that God had created the world six thousand years ago. Since the Reformation, Christendom had no longer been unified, but man’s picture of the universe had not changed: at its centre was the earth, ruled by God in heaven, and the Bible was considered an essential source of knowledge. Men of learning came into contact at school with classical Greece and Rome, which was held up as an example, along with the Bible. The culture of antiquity was thought to have been nearly perfect, and the authority of Greek and Roman authors was considered unassailable. Indeed, most of the current knowledge and the prevailing world view were based not just on the Bible, but on the learning and philosophy of the Ancients. Since the fourth century BC, Aristotle had been known simply as ‘the philosopher’, and to a large extent his ideas determined man’s picture of the universe. The most important authority in the field of astronomy was Ptolemy, who had lived in the second century AD; knowledge of plants and animals was drawn chiefly from Pliny the Elder, whose descriptions dated from the first century AD; and in the field of medicine, Hippocrates and Galen reigned supreme. Science had long been the domain of a select group of scholars, whose knowledge was based on their reading of old manuscripts. Since the invention of the printing press in the mid-fifteenth century, many more people could read the work of the classical authors, just as, after the Reformation, they had been able to read the Bible. Greater accessibility would eventually erode the Ancients’ authority, but at the beginning of the seventeenth century their word was still law. Science was mainly a question of erudition, of studying classical texts. It was therefore not uncommon for a university professor to teach both mathematics and Greek, since all knowledge came from the same source. That such knowledge was more than a thousand years old only lent it prestige, and this made the travellers’ findings all the more startling.

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The tropics, which Aristotle had declared unfit to live in, proved to be inhabited by a wide variety of peoples, and no one had seen the monsters believed by Pliny to populate the far corners of the earth. However painful it was to admit, the learning of the Greeks and Romans displayed glaring shortcomings. In fact, the entire concept of the world to which it had given rise appeared to be resting on shaky foundations. One of the areas in which the discrepancy between received wisdom and perceived reality was becoming increasingly obvious was the human body. The Ancients’ knowledge of anatomy had been limited. They had acquired the basics by studying the wounded and the dead on the battlefield and elsewhere, but they had engaged in little systematic research. Resistance to the study of cadavers had led to a stopgap measure: the dissection of animals. The anatomies of monkeys and pigs, in particular, were assumed to bear a strong resemblance to that of humans, and anatomical treatises were therefore based on dissections of these animals. Not only were human corpses in short supply, but anatomical knowledge was limited to what could be observed. Much of what went on inside the human body was impossible to see, however, so that forming a picture of its workings required many assumptions. Early anatomists based their conjectural knowledge of the body on analogies: if an unknown object displayed similarities to a known object, its properties were assumed to be comparable. A similar method had been used to form a picture of the cosmos, of which the body was considered a microcosm. In the second century, the famous Greek physician Galen—who had been brought to Rome to serve as personal physician to Emperor Marcus Aurelius—had recorded everything known about anatomy and integrated it into a system based largely on the philosophy of Aristotle, who believed that the cosmos was composed of four elements: earth, air, fire and water. Each of these four elements consisted of a specific combination of the fundamental properties of hot, cold, wet and dry. Water was cold and wet, air was hot and wet, earth was cold and dry, fire was hot and dry. An analogous theory of the human body was devised, based on the assumption that it, too, was composed of the four elements. The body produced four secretions: blood, phlegm, yellow gall (cholera) and black gall (melancholia). These bodily fluids (or ‘humours’) had the same four fundamental properties: blood was hot and wet (like air), phlegm was cold and wet (like water), and so

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on. The humours, which ensured that the various organs functioned properly, were therefore vital in sustaining life. In a healthy body, the fluids were in harmony, but such factors as food, weather, the position of the stars, or a person’s mental state could trigger an imbalance that caused the system to break down. The ideal balance was different for each individual. Galen classified people according to their prevailing humour. This determined their temperament—melancholic, phlegmatic, choleric or sanguinary— which in turn influenced their physical condition and mental state. Thus everything revolved around the various humours, and restoring their balance was the prime task of any physician. Galen’s system stood its ground for a very long time. When Frederik Ruysch was growing up, Galen was still the most important authority in the field of anatomy, even though current research had shown that his teachings were not infallible. For centuries Europeans had been content with existing learning, but now the demand for anatomical knowledge was such that it could be met only by dissecting human bodies. Even in the Middle Ages it was not unusual in certain circumstances to cut open corpses. When people died far from home, for example, the viscera were removed and the body embalmed. This was also done in the case of highly placed individuals whose funerals required lengthy preparation. In thirteenth-century Italian cities, the bodies of those who had died of disease were opened up to determine the cause of death and the health risk posed to the community. In the case of a suspicious death, such as poisoning, Italian physicians not only studied the outward signs but also performed an autopsy. Such post mortems always focused on the physical condition of individuals, but to determine whether their condition was abnormal, it was first necessary to establish the norm. The only way to do that was to dissect human cadavers. At Italian universities, dissections were carried out by professors who were keen to have their theoretical knowledge corroborated by empirical evidence. These dissections were performed in various places: at the professor’s home, in the open air, in hospitals, and sometimes even in churches. The cadaver was laid out on a table, and the students gathered round to watch the proceedings. Because the bodies decomposed rapidly in hot weather, such dissections could be carried out only in the winter, but even then, scented candles and aromatic plants were needed to combat the odour. The order of dissection was

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determined by the rate at which the various organs decomposed. The first to be examined were the organs of the abdomen, followed by the contents of the thoracic cavity and the cranial cavity, then the sexual organs, and finally the muscles, nerves, joints and bones. Between dissections, the only way to illustrate anatomy was by using skeletons, since other parts of the body could not be preserved. Otherwise students had to rely on treatises based on the writings of Galen. In those days, universities did not see themselves as research institutes, but rather as repositories of knowledge. The sole purpose of dissection was to illustrate theoretical knowledge, to demonstrate in practice what Galen had described, so that students could gain a better understanding of his writings. Sometimes, however, a dissection only raised further questions, and the questions had begun to mount up. When theory did not agree with practice, explanations were sought: perhaps what one had observed was an exception, or maybe humans had been built differently in antiquity. This, though, was at odds with the story of Creation, in which the world was perfect and immutable, and Galen, too—relying on Aristotle—had maintained that man was cast in the best possible mould. Another explanation was that tradition was simply mistaken: Galen’s original writings had been copied and translated so many times that errors had inevitably crept in. Yet the texts, even after efforts to verify them, still contained discrepancies, and so dissection came to seem more and more like a quest. Thus interest in dissection grew, and not only among students. Painters also needed to know about anatomy to depict the human body convincingly. In 1634 an anatomical atlas was published by the painter Jacob van der Gracht, a native of Flanders, who had settled in The Hague after a sojourn in Italy. Though his illustrations were based on those of an old master, he said in his preface that he had studied anatomy in Italy and, like Michelangelo, had even dissected a number of cadavers himself, in order to gain a perfect understanding of the human body, which he considered indispensable to good painting. Van der Gracht claimed that his atlas would benefit ‘painters, sculptors, engravers and even surgeons’.7 It was both edifying and exhilarating—and not just for physicians and artists—to behold the internal mysteries of the human body.

7 Jacob van der Gracht, Anatomie der uutterlicke deelen van het menschelick lichaem.

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Examining its inner workings was every bit as spectacular as gazing at artefacts from distant lands. Public anatomical demonstrations were packed to overflowing, but the procedure followed was not conducive to research. For that, more sophisticated methods were necessary. Dissection followed a fixed pattern, and the showing of certain body parts required the destruction of others. There was no time for closer inspection, because the anatomist had to keep the show moving. This made a public dissection more of a spectacle than a lesson: edifying, to be sure, but not thorough enough for experienced anatomists. Heroes As soon as dissection became a permanent part of the medical curriculum, the demand for cadavers increased. There were never enough to go around. Whenever an autopsy was requested by the authorities or a body had to be embalmed, there was usually no objection to cutting open the corpse, but a scientific or didactic dissection was something else entirely, for prolonged exhibition of the body was considered degrading. The only corpses subjected to such treatment were those of ‘strangers’: friendless souls with no one to object to their defilement. Public dissections were carried out on the bodies of executed criminals, since this was easy to justify and could even serve as a deterrent. For purposes of research, however, cadavers were generally sought among the deceased patients of hospitals for the poor. These charitable institutions took in people with no money for medical treatment and no relatives to assist them. Many of their patients were suitably friendless to qualify as subjects for dissection, but even so, the demand for cadavers always exceeded the supply. Because corpses were in such short supply, they were sometimes stolen from the scaffold or the grave. Physicians told tales about students who had opened up a grave, snatched the body, and brought it to them to dissect. Such bodies were quickly stripped of their skin to make identification impossible. To prevent such horrors, dissection was subjected to regulation, and body-snatching became a punishable offence. In various European cities, a public dissection lasting several days was carried out once or twice a year on the body of an executed criminal. In addition, certain physicians were given permission to dissect, for the purpose of instruction, a number of bodies of anonymous hospital patients—on the condition that their remains would eventually be given a decent burial.

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By the time Ruysch arrived on the scene, anatomy lessons generally took place in a theatrum anatomicum. At first such theatres were erected for a single ‘performance’ and dismantled afterwards, but in the late sixteenth century, permanent theatres were built in Padua and Leiden, and in Holland, Leiden’s example was eventually followed by Delft and Amsterdam. Finally, in 1628, an anatomical theatre was built in The Hague to provide local surgeons with a place to study anatomy. The heart of an anatomical theatre was the dissecting table, around which rose concentric rows of wooden stands to accommodate the spectators. Though the public naturally included physicians and surgeons (and their pupils), it was the local dignitaries who were automatically entitled to front-row seats. The central figure, the man on whom all eyes were turned, was the anatomist. Most anatomists sought to emulate Andreas Wijtinck, a native of Wesel who was therefore known as Vesalius. In 1543 he had published a handbook on anatomy that had inspired successive generations of dissectionists. It was an impressive work—663 folio pages, with splendid illustrations—bearing the title De humani corporis fabrica. The book caused quite a stir when it appeared, for it was based on Vesalius’s own observations, rather than the classical knowledge laid down in Galen’s ‘anatomical Bible’, which had recently appeared in a Latin edition. Moreover, when his observations conflicted with Galen’s, Vesalius made no attempt to excuse himself, as his predecessors had done. Instead, he voiced frank criticism of Galen, who, because he had been unable to carry out anatomical research on human bodies, had made the mistake of projecting onto humans what he had observed in monkeys and pigs. Vesalius opened the floodgates of criticism. His former teacher at the University of Paris was so outraged that he asked Emperor Charles V to punish him for his insolent attack on the authority of the classics. But Vesalius’s work, and particularly his approach, held its ground, while Galen’s authority suffered further erosion. Another blow to Galen’s authority was the publication in 1628 of William Harvey’s theory of blood circulation. For centuries it had been thought that the blood moved in the veins by ebb and flow, passing directly from one chamber of the heart to another. In the sixteenth century, scientists had observed that there were valves in the veins that kept the blood flowing in one direction, but they had not understood their true function. It had also been discovered that the septum, or partition, between the two halves of the heart was not perforated;

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rather, the blood passed from the right ventricle through the pulmonary artery to the lungs, and back through the pulmonary vein into the left ventricle. That, at least, did not conflict with Galen’s theory, but the idea that the blood circulated throughout the body was an affront to the classical picture of physiology. Even so, Harvey was forced to conclude that the blood was pumped by the heart through the arteries, only to return, via the veins, to the heart, where he assumed it was again heated and purified. No matter how convincing Harvey’s arguments were, in Frederik Ruysch’s youth those who agreed with him were branded as rebels. Few could countenance Harvey’s assault on the time-honoured views of physiology. Many medical men held fast to traditional ideas, and some even continued to deny that the septum was impermeable (claiming that it was only so after death), while others insisted that it contained invisible pores. In 1627 a student in Leiden saw his professor prick a septum with a needle prior to an anatomical demonstration, so that he could ‘prove’ to his students that it was porous. In the end, however, it became impossible to repudiate the circulation of the blood. Nothing was sacred any more, for if Galen had been wrong about so fundamental a point, it was only natural to wonder what else he had missed. The ultimate question was still how the human body was put together and how it worked. The search for an answer to that question was at least as challenging as the quest for new lands and new trade routes, and it could make one equally famous, for just as mountains, islands and rivers were named after the explorers who discovered them, parts of the body were named after the anatomists who first identified them. To the younger generation, Vesalius and Harvey were heroes who had relied on their own powers of observation and judgement and had dared to attack age-old convictions. Not surprisingly, various young dissectionists were eager to follow in their footsteps. One of them was Frederik Ruysch. Though still an apothecary’s apprentice, he would soon be drawn into the world of anatomy. Long after a theatre had been set up in Leiden, in The Hague anatomy was still pursued in the house of the dean of the guild. The only special piece of equipment was a dissecting table, which long stood in the house of Jan Vonk, dean of the guild, who was married to Frederik’s aunt Aaltje. From 1628 the Hague surgeons also had at their disposal a small anatomical theatre, situated in a modest building on the south side of the Grote Kerk (Great Church). The guildhall was

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on the ground floor and the dissecting room upstairs. This theatre had been inaugurated in 1628 with a spectacular demonstration: the dissection carried out by Christian Rumpf, Prince Maurits’s personal physician, of ‘a wondrous creature consisting of two girls attached to one another’. The father of the Siamese twins had been paid fifty guilders to relinquish their bodies to the guild. The painter Everhard van der Maes had been commissioned to document the event in a picture subsequently hung in the anatomical theatre. When the Hague theatre was not being used for anatomical demonstrations (which took place only in the winter months), it served as a natural history museum. Visitors marvelled at the skeletons of executed criminals, and were particularly impressed by one very unusual specimen: a body that had been stripped of its skin and viscera to reveal its nerves and muscles. It had been embalmed by the young dissectionist Louis de Bils, who had presented the Leiden theatre with a number of anatomical curiosities, including a stuffed man who still had all his skin and hair. It was said that ‘Mr de Bils can do wondrous things that have never been done since the world began and cannot be done by anyone else’.8 Frederik Ruysch no doubt marvelled at De Bils’s work like all the others, but unlike the average spectator, he nurtured an ambition to surpass him in skill and artistry. Indeed, Ruysch was to become his greatest rival, but in the meantime he still had a lot to learn. As a young man of twenty, he had begun his study of human anatomy with the most readily available parts of the body: the bones. Unless one had permission from the local authorities, it was almost impossible to get hold of research material, and an inexperienced apothecary’s apprentice could expect no favours in such matters. Ruysch therefore had to employ dubious methods to obtain study material. As Vesalius had done, he donned an old jacket and went at night to the cemetery, where the gravediggers—whom he had convinced of the scientific necessity of dissecting cadavers—opened up graves for him. From decades-old graves he took a few bones, but in the case of fresh corpses, he confined himself to close observation in an attempt to solve various riddles. It was claimed, for example, that human hair and nails continued to grow after death. Ruysch concluded that this was not so after seeing a dead woman whose ‘locks of hair were curled

8

Van der Neer, Tweede Amsterdamsche buuren-kout.

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just as tightly to her skull as when she was alive’. Evidently her hair had not gone on growing. With nails the matter was more complicated. To be sure, the nails of the dead seemed longer than those of the living, but Ruysch believed that this was an illusion. Not only were the fingertips of corpses dried out and shrivelled, but—Ruysch reasoned— sickly people often neglected to cut their nails during the last weeks of their life. He concluded that hair, nails and skin simply died along with the rest of the body. Ruysch also observed that fat did not decompose in the same way as the rest of the body. In living persons it was soft and fluid, but in corpses it hardened, becoming a kind of grease and eventually taking on a white colour. Ruysch determined that the condition of the corpse depended on the depth and dampness of the grave. He encountered bodies in all states of decomposition: some appeared to be black sludge; others were hard, dry and shrivelled; still others had dissolved into grey dust.9 According to Ruysch, another common misconception was that corpses were eaten by worms. In his view only bodies that were buried in the summer were eaten away, and it seemed to him that flies, and not worms, were the culprits: bodies affected in this way were full of flies, which he believed had sprung forth from dead worms. Ruysch thus attempted to verify or disprove a number of commonly held beliefs. In addition to his fieldwork, he concentrated mainly on preparing and studying the bones he had collected. Bones were the part of the body least subject to decay, and were therefore fairly easy to preserve. It was important to clean them well and to strip them of all fat and other perishable remains. This generally meant soaking and boiling the bones, and drying them for a long time in the sun. Ruysch attempted, as others did, to get them as white as possible. He assembled skeletons, thus learning the correct position of the bones with respect to one another, and applied himself to this so diligently that he was soon convinced that there was nothing anyone could tell him about bones that he did not already know.10

9 10

Schreiber, Leven, 10, 17; AW 544, 782–783, 1042–1043. AW 1079.

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Examination Meanwhile Ruysch’s training was nearing its end, and the time when he could set up in business was fast approaching. In October 1660, when the apothecary Gerrit Taenman was forced to sell his shop at a bargain price, Ruysch jumped at the chance. Taenman had had his shop for only two years, but business had not been good. When the guild threatened to shut down his shop if he did not pay his contributions (and arrears) within six weeks, he immediately sold the shop and its contents to Ruysch. The contract stipulated that Ruysch was to take possession of the entire inventory for 700 guilders, paying 300 immediately and the remainder four months later. His brother Hendrik agreed to guarantee the debt.11 Before he could open up his shop, however, Ruysch was required to pass an examination administered in the presence of one of the burgomasters by a committee composed of the officers of the apothecaries’ guild and a number of physicians. The exam consisted of two parts—theoretical and practical—and required the preparation of a number of medicines, both simples and compounds. Ruysch wanted to sit the examination in the spring of 1661, but in April he was told that there were three other candidates who had applied earlier, and he would simply have to wait. On 20 May, however, the day on which another candidate sat the exam, there were complaints that Ruysch had already begun to prepare medicines and was in the process of opening his shop, in flagrant violation of the rules. The magistrates summoned Ruysch immediately, ordered him to stop practising pharmacology until he had passed his exam, and warned him that if he disobeyed the rules his shop would be ‘closed by public authority and the relevant fine imposed’. Ruysch, determined to sit his exam as soon as possible, went to the next meeting of the guild board (on 24 May) and requested a written statement to the effect that he had completed his period of training. Furthermore, he wanted to know which medicines he would have to prepare for his master-proof. The board promised to meet again soon to discuss the matter, and then read him the examination code. Four days later his first assignment was fixed, and on 8 June he made an

11 The Hague Municipal Archives, notarial archive 329, notary Johan van Deutecom, 16 October 1660.

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appointment to sit the exam, which would take place on 16–17 June in the presence of the municipal physicians and two burgomasters. Ruysch passed the examination in pharmacological theory and successfully demonstrated his skill in the preparation of several compound medicines assigned beforehand by the committee.12 The diploma was not issued for some time—Ruysch finally received it in October (after paying the ten-guilder fee)—but at least he could set up in business. A close watch was kept on him, especially after the guild officers heard that he carried theriac—a remedy composed of sixty-four ingredients. The composition of theriac was strictly regulated, and the authorities were careful to guard against tampering. At the end of September, Ruysch was summoned to appear before the guild board, but did not show up until a week later, at which time he explained that he had bought the theriac from a fellow apothecary. When the guild officers visited his shop the following year, they discovered a few irregularities, but Ruysch quickly cleared them up and from then on was able to sell his medicines in relative peace. Family The apothecary shop provided Frederik Ruysch with an income sufficient to support a family—a prospect that had undoubtedly contributed to his impatience to sit the exam. Just five months after passing it, he announced his intention to marry. His eldest brother, Hendrik, and his three sisters had preceded him to the altar. Thirty-one-year-old Hendrik Ruysch had meanwhile assumed the office he had inherited from his father and had married Weijna Vignois, the daughter of a bailiff who also worked for the Hague authorities. Two years later his sister Pieternel married Weijna’s brother, Jan Vignois. The Vignois family, who belonged to the bureaucratic circles in which the Ruysch family had moved for seventy years, likewise had connections to the stadholder’s court. Hendrik Ruysch’s position as registry clerk had enabled him to support his mother and brothers and sisters. Since marrying, however, his contribution to the family income had dwindled considerably, since his marriage contract stipulated that he was to give only 300 guilders

12

The Hague Municipal Archives, apothecaries’ guild archive 376, 4 (minutes).

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a year to his mother, who also received some income from annuities.13 Still, the family’s solid position in society—attested to by the fact that all of Hendrik’s sisters found husbands at a relatively young age—was probably due not so much to their apparent financial security as to their connections with high-ranking officials. The Ruysch family was sometimes the subject of gossip—a cousin of Frederik once provoked a family quarrel and an uncle was involved in a scandalous fraud— but that did not prevent his brothers and sisters from finding spouses. Only Gijsbert, who worked as a clerk, remained unmarried. The Ruysch and Vignois families belonged to a group of burghers whose skills made them desirable as employees of the court and the new government bureaucracy. Some of them held administrative posts, while others composed poems or produced paintings, which courtiers and government officials acquired for both private enjoyment and promotional purposes. The Ruysch family therefore associated not only with civil servants, apothecaries and physicians, but also with poets and painters. Frederik, the youngest of the family and the last to marry, was twenty-three when his banns were published. His intended bride was Maria Post, a girl of eighteen, who moved in the same cultured and well-connected circles as the Vignois family. Maria Post was a daughter of the famous architect Pieter Post. Pieter Post, originally a painter in Haarlem, had been involved with his guild-brother Jacob van Campen in the construction of Honselaarsdijk Castle for Prince Frederik Hendrik as well as the house built in The Hague for Maurits of Nassau. After supplying Frederik Hendrik with some architectural designs, Post had supervised both the renovation of Noordeinde Palace and the refurbishing of the stadholder’s quarters in The Hague, where he had gone to live in 1645 when the stadholder offered him a permanent position. Frederik Hendrik soon died, however, so Post worked briefly for his son, Willem II, until he, too, died, leaving only an infant to succeed him. Post remained in the service of the court, but without a stadholder there were no building projects to carry out. His only job was to supervise the maintenance of the various court premises. Though he received commissions from a number of governing bodies and private individuals, he was probably

13

The Hague Municipal Archives, notarial archive 242, fol. 222, 12 March 1653.

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not very well-off, given the fact that none of his children married until their mother died. Maria was the first to marry. Maria Post’s marriage to Frederik Ruysch, which was solemnized in December 1661, had a modest financial basis. In any case, she brought her share of her mother’s estate and Frederik Ruysch had a bit of capital at his disposal, thanks to an inheritance he had received.14 For the rest, however, the young couple had to make do with the income from the apothecary shop. Within six months their union was sealed with a will, in which the spouses named each other as heir. If they had children, the surviving spouse would be obliged to care for their offspring and have them trained in ‘an honest trade or activity by means of which they can earn a respectable living’. The couple’s modest circumstances emerge from the stipulation that the surviving spouse was obliged to give any children who had come of age or were intending to marry their legitimate share of the inheritance, which was fifty guilders.15 Louis de Bils Frederik Ruysch’s livelihood was the apothecary shop, but his main activity was anatomical research. His attention soon shifted from bones to organs—animal organs, owing to the lack of human study material. Before long he had become skilful enough to give demonstrations, and subsequently decided to consolidate his knowledge by attending classes at the University of Leiden, since medical studies would also improve his prospects.16 He intended to follow the example of Johan van den Hove, who had impressed the professors in Leiden with his beautifully prepared skeletons. With an academic qualification, Frederik Ruysch would no longer have to serve as shopkeeper and ‘cook’ for the physicians, and he would have the opportunity to dissect human organs. It would put him on an equal footing with the most important lecturer in anatomy in The Hague, Cornelis Stalpart van der Wiel, whose father had begun as a clerk, working for Frederik’s grandfather at the Court of Audit before becoming his father’s 14 Via his grandmother Barbara van der Meulen, Ruysch was the heir of Catharina van Alkemade and Gerard Duijk (The Hague Municipal Archives, notarial archive 329, notary Johan van Deutecom, fol. 96, 26 November 1661). 15 The Hague Municipal Archives, notarial archive 507, notary Johan Lissant, fol. 365, 13 May 1662. 16 AW 1093.

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colleague at the registry of the States General. But while the career of Ruysch’s father had been cut short by his untimely death, Stalpart’s father had risen to the office of burgomaster. Cornelis Stalpart had gone to Leiden to study medicine, and soon after obtaining his doctorate, had become a lecturer in anatomy in The Hague. Frederik Ruysch had become an apothecary in order to secure a livelihood, but now he was making up for lost time. He soon became known for his anatomical skills, which he demonstrated in private lessons. This was not unusual. In fact, it was also done by the most talked-about dissectionist of the day, Louis de Bils, who had had no medical training whatsoever. In 1662 De Bils stayed for a time in The Hague, where he gave a number of anatomical demonstrations. In September, when it was announced that he was to dissect a dog, the Grand Pensionary Johan de Witt, Holland’s foremost politician, wrote to Christiaan Huygens, the country’s most famous natural scientist, to remind him not to miss the event.17 De Bils occasionally staged a public dissection of a canine corpse, but he had caused a real furore with his dissections of live dogs. These spectacles attracted large audiences eager to see De Bils’s bloodless dissecting technique. The demonstration involved tying a live dog to a dissecting table and cutting its throat, to prevent it from barking. There was almost no bleeding as De Bils cut the animal open and showed the audience its internal organs. One impressed observer reported that De Bils could ‘cut open a large dog, turn his entrails inside-out, and show everything in its body’. Moreover, ‘by a singular, wondrous and unbelievable art’ he managed to keep the dog alive for five or six hours. De Bils could even make the blood ‘flow wherever and however he liked’. He could ‘make all the arteries on one side fill with blood, so that they became taut, as though inflated, leaving those on the other side completely flat and empty’. As one witness said of this miraculous event, ‘those who have not seen it can scarcely believe it, but it is true all the same’.18 Admittedly, little blood flowed at these demonstrations, but De Bils’s refusal to divulge his secret meant that his demonstrations smacked of quackery and deceit. Experienced physicians considered it 17

Christiaan Huygens to Lodewijk Huygens, The Hague, 21 September 1662 (Huygens, Oeuvres IV, 233). On De Bils, see Fokker, Louis de Bils, and Jansma, Louis de Bils. 18 Van der Neer, Tweede Amsterdamsche buuren-kout.

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highly unlikely that an animal could be dissected bloodlessly, but De Bils had baffled them by accomplishing yet another feat: embalming the soft parts of the body in such a way that they kept their shape. His embalming skills and particularly his method of bloodless dissection enabled De Bils to claim exclusive anatomical knowledge. Scientifically schooled anatomists found both skills of interest, for their application could lead to important advancements in their field. The rapid decomposition of cadavers forced dissectionists to work hastily, but if organs could be preserved in their original form, they could be studied more thoroughly. De Bils, however, guarded his secret so jealously that no one was allowed to set foot in his laboratory. Embalming was a very old method of preservation, but until now it had always involved mummification. For centuries, it had been customary in many countries to keep the corpses of exalted personages from rotting. The body of Alexander the Great, for example, is said to have been preserved in honey. Salt was often used for this purpose, but all these methods required the fluids to be extracted from the body. Evidently De Bils used another technique, which left the corpse in a state more nearly resembling a living person. In the spring of 1651, he produced proof of his ability by presenting to the anatomist Jan van Horne, keeper of the collection at Leiden’s theatrum anatomicum, a series of animal skeletons, four human skeletons (including one of a foetus), and ‘the dried-out skin of a person, restored to its former shape’. De Bils said that he had removed the skin from the man— without cutting open his head or arms—and then sewn it up again, so that the man still had his eyes and hair and even a beard. Van Horne was amazed by the result, and also surprised at the skeletons, which were much more ‘aesthetically pleasing’ than the old, deteriorated specimens in the theatre. The most astonishing thing was that they had been prepared by a man with no medical training or academic background. Louis de Bils came from a family of traders who had built up a successful business in Amsterdam and Rouen. He had been trained as a merchant and had no knowledge of Latin, but at a very young age he had developed a passion for dissection, which he practised, of necessity, mainly on dogs. Like Ruysch, he had also collected human bones. In Rouen he had been arrested for attempting to rob body parts from a hanged criminal still swinging from the gallows. Rumour had it that his father had paid as much as 7,000 guilders to buy his son’s freedom.

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When De Bils donated his work to the anatomical theatre, Van Horne had expressed his gratitude on behalf of Leiden University in a written statement praising De Bils’s anatomical skills. The skeletons were exhibited in a prominent place, and so that everyone would know who the donor was, De Bils commissioned a large plaque—decorated with his family arms to highlight his supposedly noble descent—and had it hung next to the stairs leading up to the theatre.19 Four years later De Bils produced several more examples of his work, one of which was a body preserved with its viscera intact. He also showed Van Horne a number of prepared organs. Van Horne, who realized that such preparations would enable him to teach anatomy both summer and winter, urged De Bils to make more of them. De Bils had spent some time in Amsterdam, where he had made the acquaintance of two physicians, Frans DeleBoë and Paulus Barbette, who were very interested in his skills. In the course of their conversations, however, it soon became apparent that De Bils was unfamiliar with anatomical nomenclature. He could not name the parts of the body, and had no idea of their function. Barbette therefore gave him a textbook he had written, and it was while reading this book that De Bils first realized the value of his anatomical knowledge. To exploit the interest taken by the scientific community in his work, De Bils was in urgent need of two things: human bodies and money. In principle cadavers were supplied only to surgeons, but in Sluis, where he had settled, the authorities, tired of his repeated requests, finally gave him the bodies of several executed criminals. This was important dissecting and embalming material, but De Bils was not completely satisfied, because he objected to the way the death sentence had been carried out. It was undesirable to hang or behead the condemned, he maintained, for this damaged the internal organs. He preferred suffocation, which in his opinion could best be achieved by igniting sulphur and holding the condemned’s head in the smoke. Moreover, by giving condemned criminals their last meal five or six hours before execution and dissecting them immediately after death, it would be possible to study the process of digestion.

19 This plaque is kept in the Boerhaave Museum in Leiden. From an uncle, De Bils had inherited judicial authority over a Flemish hamlet and had referred to himself ever since as jonkheer De Bils de Coppensdamme.

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De Bils’s method of embalming was expensive. He claimed that it cost around 2,000 guilders per body—an enormous amount in those days, when most people earned no more than several hundred guilders a year. De Bils was therefore forced to borrow money from a number of people, including his father, from whom he borrowed so much that his brothers in Rouen later refused to pay out his portion of the inheritance, claiming that he had already had more than his fair share. De Bils protested, but also went in search of a job. He had hoped that Van Horne would be so grateful for his donations to the university that he would urge the Leiden regents to grant him a government post, but such a position was not forthcoming. In 1656 he was finally appointed bailiff of Aardenburg in the province of Zeeland, which provided him with a modest income but not enough to cover his expenses. He therefore attempted to cash in on the interest shown in his work. Although he would have preferred a paid position as an anatomist, his lack of credentials meant that his chances of this were very slim. Even so, accredited scientists had still not succeeded in doing what he could do, despite their theoretical training. De Bils resented their authority, and began to challenge them openly. In 1655 he published a pamphlet in which he presented himself as someone who had ‘never obtained a degree or any knowledge of Latin’, but who had learned anatomy in practice, because he ‘had been impelled to do so from the age of thirteen by an extraordinary, inexplicable passion’. He had heard that Van Horne, meanwhile a professor of anatomy, had been so delighted with his preparations that he had embraced and kissed them. He quoted Van Horne’s praise of one of his preparations as ‘a dessicated human corpse that one would think had just died’.20 While De Bils’s pamphlet focused attention on his skills, it was actually little more than an advertisement. His physician friends—who had made it clear to him that if he wished to be taken seriously, he would have to propose a theory of some kind—therefore helped him in 1658 to take part in an ongoing scientific debate in which Frederik Ruysch would soon become caught up as well.

20 De Bils’s pamphlet was titled Vertooch van verscheijde eijghene anatomische stucken (Exposé of a number of my own anatomical objects).

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Discoveries After the discovery of the circulatory system, another threat presented itself to Galen’s system of physiology. As he saw it, the four bodily fluids, or ‘humours’, which constituted the building blocks of his system, were formed in the liver. He thought that food was ‘cooked’ in the stomach into a pulp called chyle, which passed into the intestines and from there into the liver through tiny veins. The impure elements of the chyle were purified by the intestines, spleen and kidneys, but the pure elements were transformed in the liver into blood, by means of which the ‘humours’ spread throughout the body. Galen’s notion of the way blood moved through the body had been rejected by Harvey, but otherwise the theory of the humours had been left more or less intact. If Galen’s theory proved untenable, the consequences would be far-reaching, since it served as the foundation of all existing medical knowledge. Even so, the first cracks had already begun to appear. Recent findings suggested that the classical view of digestion was flawed, and men of learning were hard at work, searching for a system of physiology that could accommodate this new knowledge. The first questions had arisen in 1622, when Gasparo Aselli, a professor of anatomy at Pavia, saw white ‘threads’ in the entrails of a dog that had been fed just before dissection. These ‘threads’, which proved to contain a white fluid, were actually very fine, transparent vessels that would not have been visible if the dog had not eaten a short while before. Aselli thus made a fluke discovery of a vascular system that was not part of the circulatory system. Pondering the function of these new-found ‘lacteal vessels’, he arrived at the conclusion that they transported nutrients from the intestines to the liver, where, in accordance with Galen’s teachings, the nutrients were transformed into blood. Galen, evidently unaware of the existence of these vessels, had assumed that the nutrients extracted from digested food were transported to the liver by blood vessels. Though incorrect, this notion had not been fundamentally undermined by Aselli’s discovery. In 1647, however, Jean Pecquet, an up-and-coming French anatomist, cut open a live dog to observe its heart beating and discovered the thoracic duct. When Pecquet removed the dog’s heart, he noticed a vessel filled with a milky fluid. At first he thought it was pus, but then identified it as chyle. Further investigation led Pecquet to discover that chyle was transported not to the liver, as Aselli had thought, but to a kind of collecting vessel, the thoracic duct. Pecquet found this duct in other animals as well, and published his findings in 1651.

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At the same time, in Leiden, Jan van Horne was studying the movement of chyle through the body. He followed its path in dogs dissected after they had eaten, and went on to examine the chyle in human corpses. In 1652 he published a description of the human thoracic duct. During an autopsy he discovered chyle in the area of the kidney and followed its path, observing that it flowed into the thoracic duct. Van Horne subsequently demonstrated that all chyle flowed through the lacteal vessels to the thoracic duct. He also claimed that chyle was transported to the heart (rather than to the liver), since the fluid from the thoracic duct ended up in the superior vena cava, through which it flowed into the right auricle of the heart. Since it appeared that the lacteal vessels did not flow into the liver after all, Galen’s theory of blood formation now hung in the balance. The next blow to Galen’s theory was dealt by the Danish physician Thomas Bertelsen, a professor of anatomy in Copenhagen, who went by the Latin name Bartholinus in scientific correspondence. Bartholin, as he was also known, cut open a dog seven hours after it had eaten. Observing the liver, he noticed vessels which contained a watery fluid that was not chyle. By ligating these vessels, he could investigate the course of the fluid. He examined more dogs (which he first suffocated) to work out which vessels transported fluids from the liver. He discovered that the vessels which had been thought to transport chyle to the liver actually transported a clear fluid from the liver. These ‘water vessels’, as he called them, appeared to belong—together with the lacteal vessels discovered by Aselli—to a system that transported fluid (lymph) throughout the body. Thus in addition to the circulatory system, the body appeared to have a second vascular system, the lymphatic system. However, not everyone was prepared to accept what Bartholin regarded as an inescapable conclusion, namely that Galen’s theory of blood formation was untenable. Apparently the lacteal vessels absorbed nutrients in the intestines, and the lymph vessels conveyed fluid from the organs, but how the body processed food and fluids was not at all clear. Attempts were made to discover the precise nature of the lymphatic system, but research was difficult, for the vessels concerned were extremely thin and transparent, and when empty of fluids (such as during dissection), they were all but invisible. Because so little could be seen in human corpses, there was constant experimentation on live dogs. Physicians who could not countenance the rejection of time-hallowed beliefs and looked with sorrow on the dismantlement of classical physiology seized upon vivi-

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section as a reason to disqualify the new findings. They argued that what was true for dogs did not necessarily apply to humans, and that the condition of dying animals was an unnatural state. As yet no one had formulated a theory to explain this new vascular system, as Harvey had done to describe the circulation of the blood. Galen had been unaware of its existence, so there was no classical theory on which to base assumptions. Unlike blood, lymphatic fluid was not pumped, so it was unclear how it flowed and even less clear what its function was. Attempts were made to establish its connection to the circulatory system, and to explain both vascular networks as integral to one another. Many physicians viewed the flow of fluids through the vessels as essential to the functioning of the body. The flurry of experimentation that followed was accompanied by heated discussions about recent discoveries, with some scientists jumping to conclusions which they hoped would bring them fame. Idle Boasting Even though the Harvey of the lymphatic system had yet to come forward, the new findings were already incorporated in the reprint of Bartholin’s anatomy textbook that appeared in 1658. That same year De Bils commented on Bartholin’s theories in an article in which he attempted to show that no scientists, ancient or modern, had ever appreciated the fine points of the matter, because they had not understood the art of bloodless dissection.21 He therefore presented a version of physiology that was all his own: while accepting the existence of the thoracic duct and the lacteal and lymph vessels, De Bils doggedly adhered to the ideas of Galen and thus to the blood-forming capacity of the liver. This guaranteed him the support of reactionary medical men, but it meant that he was forced, despite Bartholin’s discoveries, to persist in the notion that the lymph vessels transported nourishing fluid to the organs instead of from them. Although Van Horne had made differing claims, he apparently found De Bils’s contribution to the discussion interesting enough to

21

The title of De Bils’s publication was Waarachtig gebruik der tot noch toe gemeende gijlbuis, beneffens de verrijzenis der lever, voorheen zoo lichtvaardig in ’t graf gestooten (The true function of what has until now been alleged to be the thoracic duct, as well as the resurrection of the liver, previously so frivolously relegated to the grave).

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help him translate it into Latin, so that foreign scientists could take note of his ideas. For that matter, a Dutch translation would also be of use, since De Bils was still using his own, singular terminology. In addition to publishing his article, De Bils pursued his course in other ways. He persuaded the authorities in Rotterdam to make a building available that could house an anatomical theatre, which would be financed as a commercial venture. De Bils intended to have his anatomical research funded by shareholders, who—in return for their financial support—would be treated to the spectacle of De Bils embalming and dissecting a corpse. He impressed upon them that their support was vital to the advancement of anatomical knowledge, for he was planning to dissect fifty corpses and use his findings to compile an anatomical atlas. To attract financial backers, he exhibited four embalmed bodies, in which the muscles, blood vessels and nerves were exposed. The intestines and brains, prepared separately, were displayed next to the corpses, which could be viewed by anyone willing to pay the hefty entrance fee. It was hoped that the corpses would find a buyer and bring in at least 10,000 guilders.22 One visitor described the corpses thus: ‘They lie there open, and one sees all the parts of a person from the inside, and something different in each one.’ There was one corpse in which ‘the intestines, complete with faeces, were still inside the body’, and another ‘that was opened in a curious way and stripped of its skin, which lay rolled up beneath its head’. In the third body, all the blood vessels had been inflated, ‘so that they hung, loosely and separately, from behind the head to below the calves and down to the toes, also on the hands, as though they were the strings of a harpsichord’. The number of veins and nerves was mind-boggling. ‘There is another body from which the skin has been removed very artfully and neatly, but with gloves left on the hands and stockings on the feet.’ There were also individual organs on display, such as an embalmed brain, which lay in a piece of the skull. The visitor concluded by saying: ‘I cannot tell you how weird and wonderful everything was. And everyone I talked to said the same.’ That the bodies had been embalmed with their internal organs was remarkable, but the fact that one was permitted to touch the bod22

De Bils published the project, recorded on 26 May 1659 in a document drawn up by the Rotterdam notary Leonard van Zijl, under the title Kopije van zekere ampele acte van jr. Louijs de Bils . . . rakende de wetenschap van de oprechte anatomije des menschelijken lichaams.

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ies was even more unusual. At the anatomical theatre in Leiden, for example, ‘one was not allowed to touch the cadavers, only to look at them through a glass’.23 To advertise his enterprise, De Bils had circulated, even as far as London, brochures that quoted, by way of recommendation, Van Horne’s statement. An intermediary had approached Professor Horne about participating in the project—his task would be to produce the anatomical atlas—but he had declined the honour. For his part, De Bils did not respond to Van Horne’s proposal that he reveal his method of embalming for a sum of money to be paid by a number of Amsterdam physicians. Van Horne was extremely interested in embalming, and had mainly helped De Bils in the hope of discovering his secret method. De Bils proved unwilling to divulge it, however, and eventually Van Horne realized that the roles had been reversed, and that De Bils had been exploiting him. De Bils’s handbills with Van Horne’s ‘seal of approval’ were compared to the posters announcing the ‘performances’ of itinerant surgeons, and his ambitious plans for a commercially viable anatomical theatre were ridiculed as well. Van Horne, who no longer wished to be associated with the project, began to distance himself from De Bils. Obviously De Bils had overestimated the appeal of his work. To be sure, the public gawked at his embalmed bodies, but hardly anyone was interested in becoming a shareholder in his business enterprise. In late 1659, when it had become clear that disaster was looming, he published a pamphlet in which he invited all interested individuals to pay him a visit: ‘I shall make them see, and prove, as clear as day (unless they be blind), that all the descriptions, both old and new, produced until now of our natural workings are not only groundless and lacking in good sense, but also plainly false and fictitious . . . I shall make them understand once and for all that no living person has yet understood either the flow or the source of the lymph vessels.’ In De Bils’s opinion, Van Horne, Bartholin, DeleBoë and all those other scientists were mistaken. In fact, the whole of the medical world was ‘completely unreasonable . . . and highly suspect’. De Bils claimed that

23 Van der Neer, De tweede Amsterdamsche buuren-kout. (Van der Neer became the publisher of De Bils’s writings.)

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Fig. 1

Depiction by R. van Persijn of a dog dissected by De Bils.

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students learned more from him in half an hour than they did from Van Horne in a couple of years.24 That insult was intolerable. De Bils had also suggested that his undertaking had failed because Van Horne had maligned him, and that, too, was a misunderstanding that needed to be cleared up. Van Horne therefore published a rebuttal, saying that he had read De Bils’s publication and taken note of his claim to be the sole possessor of true anatomical knowledge.25 But was it really true, he wondered, in ‘our century . . . in which the knowledge of anatomy has reached unprecedented heights . . . that the last seal on the book of nature has been opened?’ Could it be that ‘heaven saved this for the arrival of the “noble” Louis de Bils’, so that physicians could view the workings of the body ‘not through a cloud and a dark mirror, but through a clear glass and in bright sunlight’? If so, De Bils should not be given a marble statue like the one erected in London for William Harvey, for nothing less than a silver monument, paid for by the entire medical community, would do. But ‘saying and doing are two different things’, declared Van Horne, prompted by his years in Italy to write this in Italian: ‘dal ditto al fatto, vi è gran tatto’. De Bils could not go on in this way, performing tricks and promising surprises. Though he kept everyone ‘gaping’, Van Horne concluded, it was ‘not enough to boast and swagger’. Van Horne praised De Bils’s diligence, and was full of admiration for his embalming technique, since everyone who saw one of his prepared cadavers admitted to having ‘no idea how to imitate it, let alone to improve upon it’. It was a pity that De Bils was disinclined to collaborate with an academic, in order ‘to do even greater and more curious [i.e. scientifically sound] things’. By keeping serious natural scientists at a distance, his work remained a circus attraction. De Bils had had his handbills ‘pasted onto cardboard and hung in the vestibules of

24 De Bils’s pamphlet was called Aan alle ware liefhebbers der anatomie (To all true lovers of anatomy). 25 Van Horne’s rebuttal was titled Waerschouwinge aen alle lieffhebbers der anatomie teegens de gepretendeerde weetenschap derselver van joncheer Louys de Bils (Warning to all anatomy lovers against the ostensible knowledge of jonkheer Louis de Bils). Van Horne was not the only one who disliked De Bils’s boasting. The Amsterdam surgeon Paulus Barbette wrote in 1660: ‘Now an uneducated chap, who recently admitted to me that two years ago he still didn’t know the names of the parts of the body, will play the great master’ (Aenmerckingen op d’anatomische schriften van jonkheer Lodowijk de Bils, Amsterdam, 1660).

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the most respectable inns’, as though announcing a lottery draw or an operation performed by a quack. The demonstration he had given for physicians in The Hague had not risen above that level either: they had been shown a dead dog, prepared before their arrival, in which they could see a few small vessels. Van Horne thought that De Bils ‘could deceive others but not us’ into thinking that these were lacteal vessels. Van Horne confessed that he could not help laughing when he asked De Bils if he might witness a bloodless dissection and De Bils had responded simply by pointing to his four embalmed bodies. Van Horne knew that bleeding could be kept to a minimum by ligating the main vessels, ‘but by claiming to prevent it completely’ he was ‘seeking to pull the wool over people’s eyes’. If De Bils really understood the art of bloodless dissection, he should teach it to every surgeon, but this was the problem with De Bils: he avoided any encounter he could not orchestrate himself. When Van Horne visited the Rotterdam theatre, he was prevented from viewing the preparations closely. Representatives of Leiden University offered De Bils their support on the condition that he divulge the secret of his embalming technique, but he refused to do so, even when they promised not to publicize it. Van Horne called De Bils’s methods improper, certainly for someone who was constantly ‘bragging and boasting about his noble descent’. It was clear that De Bils had bitten off more than he could chew, and that his skills could have been used by others to better effect, but he was convinced that he would achieve recognition as an anatomist only if he continued to guard his secret. If he delivered himself up to Van Horne, Van Horne would take the credit—that much was clear. In the meantime, he attempted by devious means to obtain a position that would enable him to show off his embalming skills. He therefore continued to perform bloodless dissections, while clinging to an untenable position in the debate on the lymphatic system. De Bils’s opponents were all faced with the nearly impossible task of proving him wrong. Van Horne, for one, would have welcomed such proof. After their falling out, he had done everything in his power to demonstrate that De Bils’s notions were incorrect. Both men defended their views and rallied the support of others. Their debate, which attracted widespread interest, was partly thrashed out in public, unleashing a torrent of pamphlets and satires. At the same time, however, it touched the very heart of scientific discourse, which prompted a number of distinguished physicians to join the fray.

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In 1660, Frans DeleBoë, the Amsterdam physician who had meanwhile become Van Horne’s closest colleague in Leiden, published a short clinical treatise on the lymph vessels. He praised De Bils as a studious and passionate dissectionist, but accused him of making rash statements. Moreover, he disagreed with his views on the flow of lymph. Convinced that digestion should be seen as a chemical process, DeleBoë tried to adapt his concept to the new anatomical discoveries. Because it conflicted with his own theories, DeleBoë refused to accept Bartholin’s dismissal of the liver’s importance and demanded to know its real function. Bartholin expounded his views on this subject in an article written in the time-honoured form of a letter—in this case to DeleBoë—in which he stated that the liver produced gall and possibly filtered and purified the blood. Van Horne also approached Bartholin, asking him to supply incontrovertible proof that De Bils was wrong, but Bartholin thought his letter to DeleBoë sufficient and refused to have anything more to do with the matter. In the meantime, the health of the central figure in the debate had begun to deteriorate. De Bils had a bad cough and asthma, which he claimed was the result of inhaling poisonous substances during dissections. His commercial venture was threatening to end in disaster, and since his run-in with Van Horne, his relations with the academic world were strained. Extremely distrustful of people with a university degree, he preferred to show off his art to lay people, especially those of some consequence. The physicians who visited him therefore took care to pass themselves off as laymen, preferably of high standing. The Leiden student Heinrich Meibom and a friend pretended to be courtiers when they went to see De Bils, thus persuading him to perform a vivisection on a dog. He showed them several organs while operating on the dog with little loss of blood. De Bils’s operating and embalming techniques continued to intrigue men of learning. In the summer of 1661, Henry Oldenburg, who would become secretary of the Royal Society the following year, visited De Bils in Rotterdam. On 3 August he reported the following to Christiaan Huygens: ‘Monsieur de Bils has treated me here with great humaneness. He seems to understand anatomy very well, and is determined to make a success of the course of action he has chosen to pursue.’ De Bils had told him that he had unravelled the secrets of digestion and sperm production. When a discussion arose as to whether sperm stemmed from blood, De Bils had claimed that he could give precise answers

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to that question and various others as well.26 His business enterprise had come to naught, however, and so he left for France in an attempt to secure his share of his father’s estate. In September 1662, when he again gave several demonstrations in The Hague, the interested spectators undoubtedly included Frederik Ruysch, who soon became directly involved in the discussion surrounding De Bils. Vivisection The dogs that featured in these discussions found themselves in an unenviable position, since vivisection was performed on them with some regularity by De Bils and his adversaries, one of whom was Niels Stensen, a Dane sent to Leiden by Bartholin, who had decided to bow out of the debate. Stensen was a promising student, who in 1661 repeated the experiments on dogs on which De Bils had based his theory. Vivisection was a consequence of the need to understand the workings of the internal organs, coupled with the belief in human dominion over animals. The practice was not new. Authors writing five centuries before Christ had mentioned vivisection, and Galen had practised it in an attempt to understand the respiratory system and the motion of the heart. He investigated the workings of the brain by opening up skulls, but recommended using pigs and goats, rather than monkeys, because monkeys grimaced during dissection. Galen had no trouble justifying such forms of research, for according to his Stoic notions, only humans had the ability to reason, whereas animals were little more than inanimate objects. The question of whether or not to perform vivisection on humans had been a topic of discussion since antiquity. From a scientific point of view, of course, it was the ideal solution. Criminals condemned to death could be used for the purpose, it was suggested, but such proposals were rejected as too cruel. In 1663 the English chemist and natural philosopher Robert Boyle admitted that performing vivisection on humans was barbaric and, in any case, illegal, but because the flow of blood and chyle could not be observed in a corpse, scientists had

26 Henry Oldenburg to Christiaan Huygens, Rotterdam, 3 August 1661 (Christiaan Huygens, Oeuvres III, 310).

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no choice but to cut open live animals.27 Vesalius had given vivisectional demonstrations at the end of his anatomy courses, for he, too, had thought it necessary to study living organisms in order to gain a better understanding of bodily functions. On the whole his successors agreed with him. The discovery of the lacteal vessels by Gasparo Aselli stimulated experimentation with live animals, since it was practically impossible to examine the lymphatic system by any other means. Another incentive to study living organisms was the rise of the idea that the bodies of people and animals could be compared with a machine that obeyed certain mechanical laws. In Leiden dogs were the animal of choice, but frogs and rabbits were eventually used as well, at first to study the circulation of the blood and later to investigate the respiratory system, as well as the processes of digestion and reproduction. To test DeleBoë’s theory of the functioning of the pancreas, one of his students removed pancreatic fluid from a live dog. While studying in Leiden, Jan Swammerdam carried out respiratory experiments by cutting open pregnant dogs to determine how the puppies breathed. During these experiments he noticed that when he cut through nerves, muscles contracted. This conflicted with accepted theory, but closer examination revealed that touching a nerve produced movement in the muscles to which it was connected—movement that did not differ greatly from a natural contraction. If, for example, one cut open a dog and gently touched the nerves of the diaphragm with a needle (or fire or acid), the diaphragm instantly performed its natural function. In Swammerdam’s view, this was ‘a very nice experiment, and amusing too’.28 In his last will and testament, De Bils explained in detail how to keep dogs alive during lengthy experiments. On 10 October 1667, Robert Hooke carried out a respiratory experiment for the members of the Royal Society in London. He opened up the chest cavity of a dog, cut away the ribs and diaphragm, removed the pericardium, and then attached the windpipe to a pair of bellows so that he could pump air into the lungs. In this way he managed to keep the dog alive for an hour, while its severed trachea prevented it from barking. Hooke then poked holes into its lungs to prove that their movement was not necessary for the circulation of the blood. He fed air into them,

27 28

Boyle, Works III, 299. Swammerdam, Bijbel der Natuure, 838.

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which escaped through the holes. The lungs did not move, but the dog remained alive. Hooke then cut out a piece of the lung to show that the blood was still circulating. He concluded that a continuous supply of air, rather than the movement of the lungs, was necessary to support life.29 Such experiments might have enabled Hooke to discover the true nature of respiration, but some doubted whether, in this case, the end justified the means. ‘This was an experiment of more cruelty than pleased me’, wrote John Evelyn, who was present at the demonstration. Hooke was not happy about it either. His reluctance to perform the experiment had caused him to postpone it, but he would have preferred to cancel it altogether. In a letter to Robert Boyle, he wrote: ‘I shall hardly be induced to make any further trials of this kind, because of the torture of the creature; but certainly the enquiry would be very noble, if we could any way find a way so as to stupefy the creature, as that it might not be sensible, which I fear there is hardly any opiate will perform.’ It was not until the mid-nineteenth century that an adequate anaesthetic was found in the form of ether; until then, vivisection inevitably entailed pain. In his study of the respiratory system, Boyle carried out experiments with a recently developed apparatus: the air-pump, also known as the vacuum chamber. He noted that insects immediately fell on their backs when deprived of air. The same experiment was done with kittens. When the supply of air was restored quickly enough, the animals recovered, but otherwise they died. Boyle repeated the experiment until he had determined the precise limit, taking new animals every time, for he found it too cruel to subject kittens who had survived the ordeal to a further round of experimentation. Obviously scientists did shrink from experimenting with live animals, but they were usually able to lay aside their scruples for the sake of science. The use of laboratory animals was legitimized with the same arguments as those used to justify the eating of meat and the use of animals as beasts of burden. It was generally accepted that animals had been created to serve human needs. This notion was supposedly sanctioned by Genesis 9:2–3, in which God told Noah that he had delivered into his hand ‘every beast of the earth’. And what was true of executed criminals was also true of laboratory animals: at least in this way they could still be of some use. The inferiority of animals had been asserted in clas-

29

Sprat, History, 232.

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sical antiquity by arguing that they lacked the ability to reason, and the philosopher René Descartes had presented his own variation of that argument. His belief that thought and consciousness exist outside the material world led him to conclude that animals could not suffer. Animals could breathe and digest, and were capable of perception and movement, but their reactions were not governed by the intellect. Incapable of rational thought, they functioned in a totally mechanical way, like matter. Not everyone was convinced by Descartes’s arguments, as evidenced by a letter from Niels Stensen to Thomas Bartholin, in which he described an experiment with a dog. He reported that he had kept the animal alive for three hours in order to complete his research. To be certain of the results, however, he would have had to repeat the experiment, and he had to admit that he was loath to torture an animal for so long. Descartes’s followers may have been persuaded by his philosophy, but Stensen was sceptical, and said that if only he could believe that there was no difference between touching the nerves of an animal and the wires of an automaton, he would be able to examine the viscera of live animals longer, more frequently and with more satisfaction, for he realized it was the only way to discover things that could not be learned by any other means.30 To be sure, there had always been hesitation and even some resistance to the practice of vivisection. As far back as antiquity and the Middle Ages, unnecessary cruelty to animals had been condemned, usually not out of compassion for the animals, but because of the evil influence it was thought to have on the human character. It was vital, of course, to define the point at which cruelty became unacceptable. Naturalists were frequently squeamish about tormenting animals, but they could overcome their qualms by telling themselves that their experiments would, in the end, improve the human condition. Vivisection was also resisted for more pragmatic reasons. Many conservative physicians were unwilling to let a bunch of high-handed modernists dismantle the system devised by their heroes, Aristotle and Galen, and so they condemned vivisection out of hand, simply because it was helping to destroy time-honoured theories.

30

Stensen, Epistolae I, 140.

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Fig. 2 Frans DeleBoë, alias Franciscus Sylvius (1614–1672), was born in Hanau, where his father, the merchant Isaac DeleBoë, had settled after emigrating from Cambrai to escape persecution as a Protestant. In treating illness he made liberal use of opium, and it was said that he himself fell victim to it. Engraving by C. van Dalen Jr, 1659 (Iconographic Bureau).

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Descartes Frederik Ruysch strangled the dogs he used in the experiments carried out at the behest of Jan van Horne, whose anatomy classes he attended in Leiden. This entailed some sacrifice on his part: most students had lodgings in Leiden, but Ruysch, who lived in The Hague, had to set out in the middle of the night to arrive in time for Van Horne’s 8 a.m. lecture. Most classes were held in the academy building on the Rapenburg, but the anatomy lessons took place on the other side of the canal, in the Faliede Bagijnekerk. This church housed the anatomical theatre on the ground floor, and the library on the floor above. In the winter Van Horne performed dissections there, and otherwise gave anatomy lessons based on Vesalius. Following the example of the famous university at Padua, the physicians in Leiden also had a garden laid out next to the academy building. It was used for botany lessons, since knowledge of plants was essential in producing medicines. It was a branch of the study very dear to Ruysch’s heart. Botany was taught by Adolf Vorstius, whose theoretical lessons were based on the classical handbook of Dioscorides, who had described not only the appearance of plants but also their active constituents. These lessons took place in the morning, and in the afternoon the plants could be observed first-hand in the botanical garden. In the spring and autumn, a number of field trips were undertaken to study plants in their natural surroundings. These excursions were the high point of the course, and always ended with a festive gathering at an inn. Ruysch was invariably the most fanatic participant in these field trips. He later said that, ‘exhausted from hiking through barren, sandy places’, he had often quenched his thirst by drinking ditchwater from his hat, while his fellow students ‘preferred to savour the sweet wine at the nearby inn’.31 In Leiden, Ruysch hoped to acquire the necessary knowledge of anatomy and botany, but he often got drawn into theoretical discussions about how to obtain that knowledge. Many lessons dealt with classical texts, the value of which was a subject of debate, and for years that debate had revolved around the philosophy of René Descartes.

31

Schreiber, Leven, 7.

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The new discoveries had gradually eroded the existing world view, founded on the Bible and the philosophy of Aristotle. For a long time it had been possible to cling to traditional views by bending new ideas to fit the old picture, but it could not be denied that new foundations for knowledge had to be laid. Simply referring to the Ancients was no longer a satisfactory solution. An alternative to the philosophy of Aristotle was offered by the Frenchman René Descartes, who had settled in the Netherlands in 1629. Descartes did not publish his thoughts straightaway, for Galileo’s condemnation in 1633 had taught him to proceed with caution. He began in 1637 by publishing his Discours de la méthode (Discourse on Method), together with three essays on optics, meteors and geometry, in which he attempted to apply the general rules of his method. In these writings Descartes not only dismissed the notion of returning to classical antiquity to acquire knowledge, but also refused to bring his ideas into line with those of the classical philosophers. Clearly, the Ancients were fallible, and it was time for a new beginning. The senses could not serve as the basis of a new philosophy, because they, too, were limited. The only possible starting point was pure, logical, ‘mathematical’ thought, and Descartes thus sought to describe all natural phenomena in a mathematical way. Aristotle had attributed a cause and a purpose to each natural phenomenon, whereas Descartes sought a principle to explain them all. In 1644 Descartes published his Principia philosophiae (The Principles of Philosophy), in which he attempted to set forth an all-encompassing explanatory model. He rejected the basic assumptions of Aristotle, including his doctrine of the four elements. According to Descartes, all matter was the same. The universe consisted of invisible particles constantly in motion, and all natural phenomena were the result of the movement and collision of those particles, which moved according to natural laws deducible by reason. The whole of the universe, including the human body, could be described in terms of mechanical laws. Descartes’s explanatory model was much simpler and more efficient than Aristotle’s descriptive model, in which all kinds of mysterious powers were assumed to explain natural phenomena. Descartes’s thinking did not include the concept of purpose: everything in nature acted according to cause and effect. He rejected Aristotle’s explanation that a stone fell because it was striving to reach its natural place, and refused to believe that one could explain the properties of natural objects according to their usefulness to man, or the growth of living beings from the perspective of the end result. In Descartes’s view, the properties

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of individual objects had no explanatory significance; everything was made up of the same matter, to which immutable laws applied. Descartes’s star rose rapidly. Christiaan Huygens explained Descartes’s success by pointing out the appeal of clear, understandable language, as opposed to the incomprehensible idiom of other philosophers, who used expressions like ‘substantial forms’ and ‘intentional species’. Descartes rejected all that ‘silly nonsense’ more radically than any of his predecessors. But in Huygens’s view, the foremost argument in favour of Descartes’s philosophy was that he not only rejected old ideas, but dared to replace them with a new theory, attributing to all natural phenomena understandable causes.32 For many intellectuals Descartes’s philosophy was liberating. The Amsterdam regent and diplomat Coenraad van Beuningen credited Descartes with restoring ‘the proper use of the intellect . . . by destroying Aristotelian tyranny’.33 The world of Aristotle was a collection of random objects and phenomena, each with its own properties and raison d’être. There was no structural correlation, only a hierarchical order, in which the lower orders were presumably subservient to the higher. Science consisted of little more than classification. Descartes, on the other hand, urged a fresh approach to philosophical and scientific questions, namely the examination of each phenomenon to discover the general principle on which it was based. His world view was an incitement to research, for he held forth the hope of understanding the mechanism of nature. In Descartes’s philosophy many discoveries fell into place: the findings of Copernicus, for example, as well as the circulation of the blood. Descartes himself provided several detailed examples of mechanistic principles. Aristotelian physics paled in comparison with modern physics. In Aristotelian terms, the motion of objects could be described only vaguely, using words like ‘fast’ to describe how a cannonball falls. There was no room in the old physics for measurement and calculation. Christiaan Huygens, by contrast, worked out formulas that described motion precisely. On all sides, qualitative descriptions were being replaced by quantitative ones. Descartes’s deductive method was so successful in explaining natural phenomena that it seemed at first to be the key to everything.

32 33

Oeuvres X, 399. See Roldanus, Van Beuningen, 160.

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Fig. 3 Jan van Horne (1621–1670) studied in Leiden and Utrecht. After obtaining his doctorate in Padua in 1642, he remained abroad until 1650 (mainly in Basel and Montpellier). He died in Leiden during a plague epidemic. (Iconographic Bureau)

‘Mathematical reasoning’ became a magical catchphrase. Not infrequently, however, mathematical reasoning deteriorated into speculation, and it soon became clear that deductive reasoning also had its limitations. To begin with, Descartes’s own work proved to be flawed. In 1653, Christiaan Huygens discovered that the laws of collision on which Descartes had based his physics were faulty. Descartes had deduced them theoretically, but they were unsustainable in practice.

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He had pointed out the fallibility of the senses (and hence of empirical data), but human powers of reason appeared to be equally fallible. Clearly, the potential of ‘mathematical reasoning’ had been overestimated. While retaining logical reasoning and the mechanistic world view, scientists gradually tended more towards empiricism, since it had proved important to verify theory with observation. When Frederik Ruysch was a student, various schools of thought found favour among teachers and students alike. There were those who followed Descartes and those who were already critical of his deductive method, and others who still clung to Aristotle. Ruysch was a man of practice rather than theory. As an old man he recollected, rather scornfully, that a student had asked the theologian Johannes Hoornbeek which philosopher he followed, Aristotle or Descartes, and Hoornbeek had replied ‘I follow Holy Scripture!’34 Ruysch found it a waste of time to ask questions such as ‘Which provides more certainty, the senses or the intellect?’ Like many physicians, he was grateful to Descartes for introducing mechanical laws. Descartes had provided a model for the functioning of the human body that was instrumental in explaining its workings and structure. Yet Ruysch did not think very highly of those who considered ‘mathematical reasoning’ of paramount importance, for he believed only what he saw with his own eyes. Research Afterwards Ruysch would say that he had taken up dissection because much of what he found in anatomy books seemed so obscure. Since deciding to wield the scalpel himself, he had become obsessed with research. He was in his element in Leiden, where, despite frequent theorizing, a lot of practical research was carried out. The university was primarily an educational institution, but experimentation—inspired by Descartes and Harvey—had been going on there for years. Anatomical research was aimed primarily at discovering the structure and function of the organs. When Ruysch arrived in Leiden, most of the anatomical research was done under the supervision of Jan van Horne and Frans DeleBoë. The latter, a professor since 1658, was known in the world of science as Sylvius. His father, a Protestant merchant from Cambrai, had fled to Germany. DeleBoë had studied at various European

34

AW 1243–1244.

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universities and already had his doctorate when he arrived in Leiden in 1638. His anatomical demonstrations persuaded a number of Leiden professors of the correctness of Harvey’s theory of circulation. At this time DeleBoë was studying the lacteal vessels as well. Because his scientific efforts did not secure him a university post, he left in 1641 for Amsterdam, where he built up a very successful medical practice, making much use of chemical remedies that he often prepared himself. He sought to combine new anatomical discoveries with chemical findings, and to explain the functioning of the human body by the chemical processes that took place in it. In 1658 he was offered a professorship at Leiden for the exceptionally high salary of 1,800 guilders a year. DeleBoë’s lessons on medicine incorporated the necessary chemistry, but the subject as such was not yet taught at Leiden, for it was still shrouded in mystery and doubt. Trying to understand what went on during chemical reactions was a fascinating pastime, but it remained largely speculative. DeleBoë did not let this stop him from introducing various chemical explanations to the field of medicine, though in doing so he followed the old line of reasoning: while Galen was convinced that illness was caused by an excess of one of the humours, DeleBoë thought that fever was caused by an excess of acid; Galen treated a surplus of warm bodily fluids with cooling remedies, whereas DeleBoë cured illnesses of an acidic nature with alkaline remedies. Ruysch was also interested in chemistry, but he refused to be seduced by such speculative theories. Ever cautious, he was determined to use his practical knowledge of chemistry as an aid in studying his main subject, anatomy; DeleBoë, on the other hand, was convinced he was on the brink of discovering the secret of physiology. Eloquent and persuasive, he propagated his ideas with great enthusiasm, and became a star professor whose classes were extremely popular. He encouraged his students to hold disputations about their own observations, and also gave clinical instruction in the Caecilia Hospital. His students were enthralled by his use of the Socratic Method to question them about the patients’ symptoms. The anatomical demonstrations he carried out on the corpses of hospital patients were so well attended that extra chairs had to be brought in to accommodate the people who flocked to the morgue. Jan van Horne, who conducted the ordinary anatomy classes, was a bit younger than DeleBoë and somewhat overshadowed by his exuberant personality. Van Horne was primarily a scholar. Initially a student of law, he had developed a fascination for anatomy. His roots were in

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Antwerp, and his father had been a governor of the Dutch East India Company. The family was therefore affluent enough to allow Van Horne to study at several foreign universities. After receiving his doctorate from the University of Padua, he continued to live abroad for years. When he returned to Holland at the age of thirty, he received permission to give anatomical demonstrations in Leiden. Reports that he was about to be offered a post in Amsterdam prompted the University of Leiden to appoint him professor of anatomy in 1653. Van Horne received only a modest salary, 800 guilders a year, but he was not interested in the money. Though erudite, Van Horne had not been blessed with nimble fingers, which is why he was so impressed by De Bils’s dexterity. After trying in vain to persuade De Bils to work for him, he called in a number of talented students to help him with his research. He was interested mainly in the structure and function of the vessels and organs, and was keen to demonstrate that his notions, and not those of Louis de Bils, were correct. Van Horne’s field of research overlapped DeleBoë’s, but their goals were quite different. Van Horne was striving to supply correct anatomical and physiological descriptions, whereas DeleBoë was seeking to prove a theory. DeleBoë stimulated his students to examine physiological processes, particularly digestion, because he hoped to show that it was a purely chemical process. He was convinced that the supposedly acidic fluids secreted by the pancreas and the spleen caused food to ferment, and hence chyle to be produced from the digested food in the stomach, so he instructed his students to examine bile and pancreatic fluid to prove his hypothesis. Van Horne and DeleBoë had gathered together a small group of extremely talented students. The first to acquire a reputation was the young man whom Bartholin had sent from Copenhagen, Niels Stensen. The gifted son of a Lutheran goldsmith, Stensen was mainly interested in philosophy and mathematics, but had begun to study medicine with an eye to earning a living. In the summer of 1660, Stensen had come to Leiden to study with Van Horne. Before this he had spent several months in Amsterdam, with the physician Gerard Blaes. In Amsterdam, Stensen had bought a sheep’s head from a butcher in order to study the brain. In the course of his investigations, he found a passage unknown in the literature. He consulted the recently published book on lymph vessels and glands by the English anatomist Thomas Wharton, but it mentioned nothing of the kind. Stensen asked

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Blaes’s opinion. He thought that the passage might be a result of the process of preparation, or even a freak of nature. Further research, however, revealed the same thing in the head of a dog. Stensen had discovered the excretory canal of the parotid gland. Blaes, who already gave anatomy lessons and hoped to become a professor at Amsterdam’s Athenaeum Illustre, tried to claim the discovery, but Stensen would not permit it, and his adamance led to public discord. Blaes rudely tried to push Stensen to the sidelines, dismissing him as a mere student and a shameless and arrogant ingrate. But Stensen stood his ground, and demonstrated Blaes’s highhandedness by providing detailed criticism of his account of the discovery, which culminated in the allegation that Blaes still did not know, a year later, where the canal began and ended. In Leiden, Stensen continued his study of the parotid gland, which was important to Van Horne’s research into the flow of fluids through the body. According to De Bils’s theory, the lymph was conveyed to the glands and there secreted. But Stensen came to the conclusion that the lymph actually flowed from the salivary gland. Van Horne was obliged to him for the point thus scored, and publicly called the excretory canal of the parotid gland the ductus Stenonianus, thereby crediting Stensen (whose Latin name was Steno) with its discovery. Van Horne also availed himself of the skills of another student, the young Frederik Ruysch, whom he urged to study the lymph vessels, in the hope that he would be able to demonstrate the presence of valves. For years it had been assumed, based on analogies with the circulatory system, that there were valves in the lymph vessels that prevented lymphatic fluid from flowing in both directions. According to De Bils’s theory, there were no such valves, so if Ruysch succeeded in demonstrating their existence, it would lay De Bils’s theory to rest once and for all. It was now up to Ruysch to invent a method of preparation that made this possible. Preservation In their attempts to answer physiological questions, dissectionists active in the mid-seventeenth century were hindered by one main problem: corpses were subject to rapid decay. The shelf life of a cadaver was usually long enough to show students the parts they had learned about in textbooks, but not to explore the complicated issues under investi-

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gation by Ruysch and his fellow anatomists. To further their research and to show their findings to others, they were obliged to carry out the same dissections over and over again. Not only was this inefficient, but working in the midst of blood and putrefaction was extremely unpleasant. There was a constant shortage of corpses, but the biggest problem was the haste needed to complete a dissection before decomposition made work impossible. And haste led to mistakes during dissection and inaccuracies afterwards, when the findings were written up. During dissection, a quick sketch was made, and if the anatomist wanted to publish his findings, the drawing was worked up in detail and an engraving was commissioned. However, the speed at which the original drawings were made often impaired their clarity, and afterwards they were subject not only to manipulation but to a confusingly wide range of interpretations. Finding a way to preserve body parts would lead to more accurate—and verifiable—illustrations. The rate of decay was not the only fundamental problem; more importantly, a corpse was not in the same state as a living person. Ruysch was particularly vexed by this problem, since it prevented him from examining the tiniest vessels, which emptied after death and thus became invisible. It was also difficult not to damage vessels during dissection. Discouraged by the drawbacks of working with corpses, dissectionists sometimes resorted to vivisection, for which there was an abundance of material, though not everyone could bear to inflict so much pain on laboratory animals. Besides, there was a limit to the time an animal could be kept alive, so vivisection also called for haste, as well as skill. Another disadvantage was that animals were not comparable to humans in every respect. It was therefore a matter of some urgency to discover a method of preserving body parts and making tiny vessels visible. To this end, a variety of experiments were carried out, one of which in particular—the embalming method developed by De Bils—had aroused the interest of the medical world. Jan van Horne was also doing his utmost to find a suitable method of preparation. He had a respectable reputation as a dissectionist, but he had not made much progress in the art of preservation. Later, Ruysch described his efforts rather sarcastically, saying that Van Horne had never progressed beyond the preparation of a human arm, and even then had merely detached the muscles and preserved them in salt. According to Ruysch, this preparation was ‘dry in dry weather, and in

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wet weather, dripping with brine’.35 Ruysch was much more dexterous than Van Horne, and though Van Horne never said so, Ruysch was certain that he was jealous of his preparations.36 De Bils had found a better method, and Ruysch, too, was intent on improving his technique. Both men refused to disclose the fact that they were using alcohol-based fluids mixed with spices. Ruysch’s efforts to find a better preservation fluid benefited from his experience as an apothecary. He felt he was on the right track, but he was still not satisfied with the result. Secret Formulas In classical antiquity attempts had been made to preserve corpses in a liquid, as a replacement for tissue fluid, but it was not until the introduction of alcohol that some measure of success was achieved. The use of alcohol in embalming had been described as early as 1582 by the famous French surgeon Ambroise Paré, whose collected works appeared in the mid-seventeenth century in a Dutch translation. Paré advised removal of the brain, viscera and blood, after which the body was put in a wooden barrel filled with wine vinegar, to which salt and various spices had been added. About ten litres of brandy were poured into this mixture, and the body was left to soak for twenty days, before being put in a lead coffin and taken to a cool, dry place for safekeeping. Paré could explain his success only in Aristotelian terms: daily life taught one that fruits and spices could be preserved in vinegar, which was cold and dry—properties that slowed down decay. Paré claimed that he had succeeded in keeping an embalmed body for twenty-five years, and that its nails had continued to grow, making it necessary to cut them several times.37 It is highly likely that De Bils and Ruysch both experimented with Paré’s method. De Bils’s secret was that he marinated the bodies for months in an alcoholic bath to which spices had been added. This was why he needed so much money. He took a body, sawed off the crown of the skull, opened the abdominal and chest cavities, and then left it for several months in a pewter coffin, lying in a mixture of brandy and

35 36 37

AW 1099. Schreiber, Leven, 6. Paré, De chirurgie, 909–910.

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Fig. 4 Reinier de Graaf (1641–1673) was a fellow student of Frederik Ruysch, who called him a ‘very astute dissector’ and ‘my true friend’. In 1665 De Graaf left for France, and obtained his doctorate that same year in Angers, after which he began a medical practice in Delft. He designed a clyster-pipe (enema), a larger variant of the syringe he had invented to fill blood vessels, and later became famous for his description of the genitalia. In 1672 the publication of De mulierum organis led to a dispute with Swammerdam, who accused De Graaf of stealing his discoveries. De Graaf died soon afterward. Engraving by Gerard Edelinck, 1666 (Iconographic Bureau)

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vinegar, to which tan-bark, alum, pepper and salt had been added. One corpse required 250 litres of vinegar, 500 litres of brandy, a bag of fine salt, 50 pounds of pepper, 50 pounds of alum, and 60 pounds of tan-bark. According to De Bils, the whole had to be stirred quickly ‘to prevent its strength from evaporating too much’. After the corpse had lain in this salty substance for three months, it had to soak for a time in the same mixture, but this time without the salt, ‘to draw out the salt and induce the body to dry out’. De Bils then added 20 pounds of aloes and 20 pounds of myrrh, both of which were thought to act as a preservative. From time to time the mixture had to be stirred and replaced, which meant that two coffins were needed. Finally, the cadaver was dried, rubbed with a balsam, and kept in a closed, airtight coffin. Bodies destined for dissection had to be kept moist. While De Bils and Ruysch took great pains to keep their methods secret, in England the use of alcohol in preservation was openly discussed. In 1660 the physician Edward Warner succeeded in preserving two foetuses in a liquid, but did not reveal its composition. However, Robert Boyle, who in 1659 had shown some interest in De Bils’s business venture, named spirits of wine as a suitable preservative in his 1663 publication Of The Usefulnesse of Naturall Philosophy. Boyle was not an anatomist, but he thought that as a natural philosopher and experimentalist he could make a number of useful contributions to the study of anatomy. One of his suggestions was ‘that diligent tryal were made what use might be made of spirit of wine for the preservation of a humane body’. Spirits of wine was a clear liquid that did not harm body parts, as salt water did. Boyle declared that he had sometimes preserved body parts in it for months, without impairment to their shape or consistency. Nor had the organs decayed or dried out. Preservation in spirits of wine was discussed at a meeting of the Royal Society, and Boyle hoped ‘that in time some such way of preserving the bodies of men, and other animals, will be found out, as may very much facilitate, and advance too, anatomicall knowledg’.38 The use of alcohol, however, presented several obstacles. First of all, something had to be done to prevent its rapid evaporation. Its cost was also a serious problem, certainly when used in the quantities required by Paré and De Bils. Finally, research was still needed to determine which kind was most effective.

38

Boyle, Works III, 310.

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One of the first to use alcohol successfully was a fellow student of Frederik Ruysch, Jan Swammerdam, whose initial experiments with preservation involved insects. Swammerdam, who was about the same age as Ruysch, was the son of an Amsterdam apothecary who had amassed a renowned collection that included hundreds of shells and other naturalia, as well as countless curiosities, including an almanac written in Turkish, a mermaid’s hand, a unicorn horn ‘six feet and three thumbs long’, and even ‘a man-made mouse with copper wheels and iron springs’. His father had intended him for the ministry, but Jan was bent on studying nature. His interest had been aroused by one of his boyhood chores: cleaning his father’s collection. He soon started a collection of his own, concentrating on insects. To this end, he hiked around the countryside to gather specimens, and consulted the most important writings on the subject before classifying his finds. Swammerdam was eventually allowed to study medicine, the subject most closely related to natural science. Like Ruysch and Stensen, he studied with DeleBoë and Van Horne. Although insects remained his great love, he became passionately involved in the anatomical research being carried out in Leiden. In a letter written to Thomas Bartholin in March 1663, Niels Stensen described Swammerdam as a very intelligent young man, who was intensely occupied with the study of anatomy. In order to prove a number of his theories, DeleBoë had urged Swammerdam to investigate the workings of the muscles and the respiratory system, which he did by performing experiments on frogs and dogs, and demonstrating them from time to time to his teacher. Swammerdam was also searching for a way to dissect with greater efficiency and precision. He kept his insects in spirits of wine, and also experimented with oil of turpentine, in search of the best method of preservation. Preservation was not enough for Ruysch, however. He had not yet succeeded in demonstrating the existence of the valves in the lymph vessels, and was therefore seeking a method that would make it possible to see in a corpse the same things visible in a living being. Dissections had traditionally been carried out with a variety of knives, scissors and hooks, as well as cauterizing irons to stop the flow of blood. Ruysch, however, tried something new: he attempted to preserve bodies (or parts of them) by replacing the blood in the vessels with air, which made them clearly visible. Unfortunately, the method was extremely laborious. Not only was it difficult to insert a tiny tube into a vessel, but to show or preserve a vascular system, it would be necessary to ligate hundreds, if not thousands, of vessels.

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In the summer of 1664, when these experiments were being carried out, twenty-six-year-old Frederik Ruysch thought it high time to obtain his doctorate, which was, at this point, little more than a formality. He wrote his dissertation not on his anatomical research but on the conventional subject of pleurisy. In a public ceremony presided over by his supervisor, Van Horne, Ruysch defended his thesis. He demonstrated sufficient knowledge of pleurisy and was given his degree.39 After receiving his doctorate, Ruysch carried on with his apothecary shop, but he also continued the research he had begun as a student, concentrating mainly on the structure of the liver and the spleen.40 He now found Van Horne’s explorations of that structure unsatisfactory. The vessels in an organ were thought to end in the parenchyma, the functional parts of an organ. To examine the vessels, livers were ‘stripped of their flesh’, or ‘excarnated’, which involved scraping away the tissue around the vessels with one’s fingernails or a blunt knife.41 The ends of the vessels thus exposed were pinned to a board, and after drying, drawings were made. Ruysch had started to experiment with other methods as well. When examining a liver or a spleen, he began by squeezing it out carefully in water. Undeterred by the numbness in his fingers when he did this in the winter, he then drained the blood from the vessels, blew air into them, and left them to dry in the sun and wind. He first did this with the spleen of a calf, and managed to preserve intact its surrounding membrane. After drying, he removed the membrane with a sharp knife, thus exposing the fibrous connective tissue of the spleen in its natural state. Ruysch prepared a number of calf spleens and took

39 Ruysch dedicated his dissertation to his father-in-law, Pieter Post, his brother Hendrik Ruysch and the Haarlem physician Jacob van Santen, a fellow student, with whom he had recently dissected the body of a girl, in the course of which they found, to their surprise, thirteen ribs on either side, instead of twelve. 40 In August 1665, Ruysch registered a new servant with the guild (The Hague Municipal Archives, apothecaries’ guild archive 4, 7 August 1665). 41 AW 536. Ruysch wrote in 1705: ‘It is more than forty years ago that—in the service of my worthy supervisor Mr Johan van Horne, professor of anatomy at Leiden— we sometimes came to “excarnate” livers (as we were wont to say), and what was done? We scraped off the ends of the vessels with our fingernails, blunt knives or other instruments, as appears in the published depictions of some authors, as well as in those forty-year-old preparations, which I have saved as mementos from that time’ (AW 702).

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them to Van Horne, who was so enthusiastic that he showed them to his students and then at a public demonstration, where they excited wonder and admiration.42 DeleBoë, too, admired Ruysch’s anatomical experiments. When he saw the fibrous tissue in a prepared calf spleen, he was so convinced that it would also be found in humans that he went ahead and published this ‘fact’ without bothering to verify it.43 Such experimentation was toilsome, but this did not deter a passionate dissectionist like Ruysch, who declared that he had ‘stripped the flesh’ from more than a hundred livers. In his view, he had far too little opportunity to dissect human bodies, and so had to make do with animals. Later in life he reminisced about his early efforts: ‘In my youth I spent my time constantly dissecting animals; in those days I often dissected horses, and frequently oxen as well, only to have something to examine.’ He was overjoyed when he discovered anything out of the ordinary. One day, when inspecting the mammary gland of an ox, he thought he saw a special tube, through which fluid flowed from the gland. Later that day he could still picture it perfectly: after filling the vessels with air, he had seen a fine, transparent branch, which he thought must be the end of an excretory tubule. No one had ever claimed to have seen such a thing, and he was convinced that he had made an original contribution to the study of anatomy: ‘I thought myself happier than the King of Persia! I straightaway called in the painter to make an illustration (because at the time I could not yet paint well enough), and he made a very nice depiction of it.’ Even so, he was not entirely sure of himself. ‘Afterwards, when I considered the matter more carefully, I was reluctant to share such a thing with the scientific community.’44 A discovery that Ruysch did claim openly was the bronchial artery (arteria bronchialis), which transported arterial blood from the aorta to the lungs. He had found it in a calf. Ruysch’s research, after all, led him to open up cows, horses, sheep, dogs, and occasionally even mice—and this was not always for lack of anything better to dissect. In examining the spleen, for example, it was easier to use a cow spleen, since a human spleen was more difficult to prepare. Sometimes he

42 43 44

AW 141, 263, 536. AW 263–264. AW 1011.

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examined dead animals to get a clearer picture of a human body part: ‘To make the tiniest of parts appear somewhat larger before my eyes, I spared neither horse nor cow.’45 From time to time Ruysch collaborated with others: the Haarlem physician Jacob van Santen, for instance, as well as Reinier de Graaf, whom he considered a bosom friend. De Graaf had arrived in Leiden some time after Ruysch. A Roman Catholic, he had studied in Louvain and Utrecht before going to Leiden in the spring of 1663—together with his elder brother, a law student—to complete his studies. DeleBoë had urged De Graaf to perform an experiment on a dog, to prove his theory of fermentation, and in this context he had also studied the pancreas. He soon found kindred spirits in Stensen, Swammerdam and Ruysch, with whom he became engrossed in the problems of preparation. De Graaf greatly admired Ruysch’s skill, and sometimes asked him to make a preparation for him. He once said that, with regard to this art, Ruysch ‘had been born under a lucky star’.46 Frederik Ruysch usually worked alone, particularly in his quest for a method of making minute vessels visible. He had meanwhile mastered the art of preservation, and since 1663 had kept a collection of his best specimens, which included a sheep’s heart, a human arm and a foetus with its muscles laid bare. Like many anatomists, Ruysch was especially interested in one of the great unanswered questions of his day—the mystery of reproduction and embryonic growth—for which he succeeded in preserving study material, including an embryo: ‘a tiny human creature, no bigger than a grain of rye, complete with placenta and umbilical cord’.47 Even though Ruysch had not yet discovered the ideal embalming technique, he was well on his way to surpassing De Bils in that field. First, however, he wanted to amaze his rival by showing him the valves in the lymph vessels. Confrontation with De Bils Meanwhile, De Bils had been having his ups and downs. In 1662 his prepared corpses had impressed none other than the viceroy of the Spanish Netherlands, who had been instrumental in persuad45 46 47

Klapvliesen, AW 21–23. AW 1100. See also AW 748, 785; Klapvliesen, AW 20. AW 706.

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Fig 5a (Fig. 1) Depiction by Frederik Ruysch of the lymph vessels—ligated and filled with air—in which the valves are visible. A is the longitudinal section of a lymph vessel. B shows a vessel from the side and C from the front. (From Ontdekking der klapvliesen in de water- en melkvaten)

ing the Roman Catholic University of Louvain to purchase De Bils’s embalmed bodies. Professor Gerard van Gutschoven had inspected the cadavers on behalf of the university, and on the basis of his enthusiastic appraisal, the States of Brabant had bought five bodies for a total of 22,000 guilders—a transaction that included the secret of De Bils’s preparation method. De Bils, an orthodox Protestant, had been appointed to the post in Louvain with an ample salary of 2,000 guilders

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Fig. 5b (Fig. 2) Illustration from Frederik Ruysch’s collected work of the valves in the lymph vessels of a horse liver. In the first edition the depiction was signed, but because Govert Bidloo mocked him for this, Ruysch omitted his signature in subsequent editions (see Chapter 5). Bidloo’s criticism of the proportions seen in this illustration prompted Ruysch to say that he had depicted the lymph vessels disproportionately large with respect to the liver, to make the valves easier to see. Moreover, he had drawn only a few glands, because it was not his intention here to depict the glands so much as to show the valves in the lymph vessels. The glands are marked with a D, the lymph vessels with E and G, and the valves with a g.

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a year. Before he could take up the post, however, he was declared persona non grata. In the summer of 1663, De Bils had been summoned to Den Bosch to examine the body of a nun who had died in 1658. The noblewoman Maria Margaretha van Valckenisse, the mother superior of a convent in Oirschot, had caused quite a sensation in her lifetime with her stigmata and visions. The commotion had continued after her death, for her body, which seemed to defy decomposition, reputedly emitted a sweet odour. What is more, there was a surgeon who claimed that he could cure the sick by touching them with the instruments he had used to treat the nun on her deathbed. At some point the corpse had started to secrete an oily substance that was thought to have healing properties and was therefore collected in bottles. The nun’s body, initially buried, had meanwhile been exhumed and was kept in her convent, which had become a place of pilgrimage. The population of Brabant was overwhelmingly Roman Catholic, but since the northern part of Brabant had been captured from the Spanish, its government was Protestant. The cult in Oirschot irritated the Protestants, who rejected all belief in saints, relics and miracles. The authorities had accepted the fact that part of the population wished to remain Catholic, but they viewed such hocus-pocus as a provocation. Five years after the nun’s death, the government intervened. The States General had the convent surrounded by troops, who confiscated the body (which had been hidden under a bed) and took it to the town hall in Den Bosch. De Bils was charged with examining it in the presence of thirteen doctors: physicians and surgeons, both Roman Catholic and Protestant. Shortly after the nun’s death, three professors from Louvain had examined her body and proclaimed that supernatural forces were at work, but the authorities now wanted the opinion of an independent expert. During the autopsy, which was carried out in the town hall, De Bils ascertained that the preservation of the nun’s body was not due to supernatural causes, as the Louvain professors—his intended colleagues—had maintained. To begin with, he established that the corpse was, in fact, decomposing: it emitted a stench, there were flies crawling out of it, and the skin displayed black spots. All the viscera appeared to have been removed, and a dark powder had been sprinkled in the abdominal cavity. De Bils concluded that ‘until now the body had been preserved from complete decomposition by human intervention’. The therapeutic oil flowing from the body was ‘nothing but bone mar-

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row’, mixed with fat and fluids. The authorities had heard enough, and issued orders for the body to be taken to the cathedral in Den Bosch for burial. De Bils had been faced with the choice of destroying his reputation and becoming a laughing-stock in Holland, or jeopardizing his career in Louvain. Apparently he had been either unwilling or unable to come up with a diplomatic solution, but he paid a high price for his honesty. Even though he had a contract, he was subjected to such intimidation that he no longer dared to show his face in Louvain. His embalmed bodies, which had been put on display there, were deliberately neglected and soon began to decompose. Disappointed, De Bils moved to The Hague, where another setback awaited him. He met his rival Frederik Ruysch, who was unrelenting in his efforts to demonstrate the existence of valves in the lymph vessels, which would disprove De Bils’s theory of the workings of the lymphatic system. De Bils, still convinced of his superiority, told Ruysch that his research was in vain, but vowed that if Ruysch did succeed in demonstrating the existence of such valves, he would retract all his claims and recognize him as his better. The stakes were high, and Ruysch was sufficiently piqued to persevere until he had reached his goal. At first it seemed a hopeless task. It was difficult enough to see the vessels themselves, let alone their valves. Ruysch discovered that the lymph vessels were invisible unless they were filled with digested food, so he continued to strangle dogs, which he fed about three hours before he cut open their stomachs. The dark colour of the chyle, however, made it impossible to distinguish any valves. He realized that in order to see the valves he would have to fill the vessels with air, and yet that was impossible, because none of the blowpipes he tried could be inserted into such delicate vessels. After many futile attempts, he finally succeeded, thanks to the minuscule blowpipes specially made for him by Samuel van Musschenbroek, a young Leiden instrument-maker. Ruysch declared that the pipes were of ‘an unbelievable thinness’, and called Van Musschenbroek an ‘unparalleled artist’.48 In preparing the lymph vessels, Ruysch followed the same procedure as in his earlier preparations of the liver and spleen. He began by tying off a lymph vessel full of chyle near the glands of the mesentery, so

48

AW 1004, 1214.

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that it could not empty and become invisible. He then inserted a tiny blowpipe on the side of the intestinal membrane, untied the thread with which he had ligated the vessel, and used his finger to squeeze out the chyle. After retying the vessel, he blew air into it and tied the other end (without letting the air escape), before carefully cutting it out and hanging it to dry in the sun. Then came his moment of triumph: he saw valves galore, attached like little half-moons to the inside of the vessels. In old age it still gave him great joy to remember that moment. As evidence he prepared several lymph vessels, containing some two thousand valves, and saved them for his confrontation with De Bils. Ruysch first showed the prepared vessels to DeleBoë and Van Horne, who urged him to show them to De Bils at once, but he preferred to wait for the right moment. Evidently De Bils had heard rumours, because a few days later he went to see Ruysch in his apothecary shop and said: ‘There are people who claim to have seen the valves in the lymph vessels, but no one is capable of demonstrating such a thing.’ Ruysch, wary of De Bils, was reluctant to show him the valves in the absence of witnesses, but not long afterward De Bils appeared again, and this time there were three physicians present. A discussion ensued, during which De Bils declared that the classical theory that sperm stemmed from blood was incorrect: though blood was transported to the testicles by the spermatic arteries, other nearby arteries then conveyed it towards the heart. De Bils maintained that sperm originated from the fluid transported by the lymph vessels to the testicles. Ruysch, seeing his chance, retorted that that was a physical impossibility. De Bils insisted on knowing why. ‘Because of the valves’, Ruysch replied, whereupon De Bils asked if he had ever seen them. Not only had he seen them, Ruysch said, but he had proof of their existence. De Bils demanded to see it. This was the moment Ruysch had been waiting for: he showed De Bils and the others a prepared vessel with its valves. De Bils was silent, but the others confirmed Ruysch’s findings. De Bils tried to stall by asking Ruysch to cut open the vessel, because he could not see the valves clearly. Ruysch complied with his request, but even though there was no denying it, De Bils still refused to admit that he saw the valves. He then demanded that Ruysch show him the precise course taken by the lymph through the body, declaring that only then would he really respect his genius. That was not the point, Ruysch replied. He had merely shown that there were valves in the lymph vessels, which De Bils had always denied. De Bils, whose standing as a leading dissectionist was at stake, raised his voice: did Ruysch actually

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think that he was unaware of what was in the lymph vessels? De Bils, to whom not even the tiniest parts of the body, much less the valves in the lymph vessels, remain hidden: ‘For although I admit having denied the existence of valves in the lymph vessels, that is no reason to think that they were unknown to me. I have said other things, too, that went against my feelings.’ Ruysch exclaimed that it was unseemly for a man who boasted of his noble descent—and was a lecturer in anatomy, no less—to invent such lame excuses. It behoved an honest scientist ‘to endorse open-heartedly the findings of others’, when they were demonstrated so convincingly. Ruysch again proved, in the presence of all the Hague physicians, that the shape of the valves made it impossible for lymph to flow in the direction De Bils had indicated. De Bils, however, refused to accept that his view of the lymphatic system had been successfully refuted, and told everyone that Ruysch had been unable to counter his defence. Ruysch called De Bils a ‘mischief-maker’ and advised everyone to consult the witnesses, who would back him up. To prove the existence of the valves once and for all, Ruysch published his findings in a slender volume titled Dilucidatio valvularum in vasis lymphaticis et lacteis (Exposition of the valves in the lymph and lacteal vessels).49 He dedicated it to DeleBoë, Van Horne and a third Leiden professor, Floris Schuyl, a mathematician who had translated Descartes into Latin. In his book, Ruysch gave a detailed account of his run-in with De Bils, followed by a discussion of his working method and a description of the form and function of the valves. His findings were illustrated with drawings by his own hand. He did not claim to have discovered the valves, only to have found a way of making them visible. When Jan Swammerdam saw Ruysch’s book, he was surprised. At the time of its publication, he had just returned from France, having left the Netherlands in the spring of 1664. He had lived for a time in Saumur, where a Protestant university had been established, and had then spent a year in Paris. Unaware of Ruysch’s work, Swammerdam had been studying the lymph vessels as well, and had also succeeded in proving the existence of the valves, which he had shown in a public demonstration in Sau-

49 It was translated into Dutch as Ontdekking der klapvliesen, in de water- en melkvaten (AW 1–29).

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mur in June the previous year. A week later he had sent a drawing of the valves to Niels Stensen, then with his dying mother in Copenhagen. Swammerdam had sent the letter to Stensen’s father in Amsterdam, to be forwarded to Denmark, but his father had kept the letter with the drawing until Stensen’s return to Holland. Because his father had supposedly shown the drawings to various physicians, Swammerdam at first suspected Ruysch of plagiarism. But Ruysch said he had known nothing of Swammerdam’s drawings, and in his view the drawings were not the point: what was important to him was that the lymph vessels had been prepared in such a way that they could finally be seen. Ruysch’s interest lay mainly in the technique of preservation. Only when that problem had been solved could questions about the structure of the body be answered, and only then would there be grounds on which to speculate about the function and meaning of the various parts of the body. Swammerdam did not bear a grudge against Ruysch; on the contrary, the two remained on friendly terms. Swammerdam told Ruysch how much he admired the clarity of his drawings, and sent a copy of his book to Paris, to Melchisedec Thévenot—a diplomat who had invited Swammerdam to join the group of scholars from which the Académie Royale des Sciences would later emerge—saying in the accompanying letter that he was happy that the truth about the valves in the lymph vessels had now been incontestably proved.50 In addition to the discussion of the valves, Ruysch’s book contained twenty-six anatomical observations. Most of these were spin-offs of his study of the lymph vessels, the liver and the spleen, but they also included his discovery of the bronchial arteries. Ruysch kept the vessels he had so painstakingly prepared. The inventory of his collection drawn up in 1690 listed ‘the skeleton of a human embryo of four months, holding in its left hand a bundle of lymph vessels, which I removed from a body more than twenty-five years ago, inflated, and preserved in such a way that the valves are still clearly visible. What a lot of trouble beautiful things can be!’51

50 Swammerdam gave his description and drawings to Blaes, who published them in 1666. Swammerdam himself did not publish them until 1667, in De respiratione. 51 AW 198.

CHAPTER TWO

ESTABLISHED AND ENVIED After his success at demonstrating the valves in the lymph vessels, Ruysch continued to perfect his preparation techniques, taking pains to find a method suitable for the brain, whose soft tissue posed great difficulties. He had achieved interesting results, succeeding not only in embalming the human brain, but also in preserving the body of a boy so that his face retained a natural appearance. Whether it would stay that way remained to be seen, but for the time being the result was stunning. Ruysch’s reputation as an embalmer grew so quickly that in the summer of 1666 he was given a government assignment. Since the spring, the Dutch Republic had been at war with England, and on 11 June their fleets clashed in a four-day encounter off Ostend. The English, who had launched the attack, also suffered the greatest losses, so that afterwards the battle was claimed as a victory for Admiral Michiel de Ruyter and a day of thanksgiving was held to celebrate the triumph. On the English side, Vice-Admiral William Berkeley had been killed in action on the first day of battle. The Dutch intended to return Berkeley’s body to the English, and Ruysch was asked to embalm it. It was no simple task, considering Berkeley’s wounds (he had bled to death after being shot in the throat), but after Ruysch’s treatment his body seemed, in the words of Samuel Johnson, like ‘the fresh carcase of an infant’. The English government resolved to give Ruysch a reward in keeping with ‘their grandeur and the artist’s merit’.1 Ruysch’s embalming work continued, and his collection now featured a uterus containing a four-month embryo. Satisfied that he had been able to preserve its round shape, he sent a similar specimen to the Amsterdam surgeon Job van Meekeren, who was on good terms with Jan van Horne and Frans DeleBoë.

1

Hazen, Johnson’s Life, 330.

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Frederik Ruysch was regularly confronted with death, personally as well as professionally. His eldest brother, Hendrik, died in September 1665; for years he had been the help and stay of the family, so his death at the age of thirty-five caused great consternation. His sisters quarrelled with their mother about the income from the annuities taken out in their name. Since Hendrik had married and left home, their mother had used this income to support the family, but now only one child was still living with her: Gijsbert, who was nearly thirty and earning a clerk’s salary. The sisters therefore claimed the proceeds from the annuities, and other members of the family were forced to intervene to settle the ensuing quarrel. It was agreed that the mother would receive half the money and the sisters would split the other half.2 The household of Frederik Ruysch and his wife, Maria Post, had meanwhile grown. Their first child—born eighteen months after they married and named after Frederik’s father, Hendrik—had died shortly after birth, but in the spring of 1664 Maria gave birth to a daughter, whom they named Rachel, after her maternal grandmother. Another child was on the way when Frederik Ruysch was asked in December 1666 to take up the position of praelector, or ‘reader’, of the Amsterdam surgeons’ guild. Anatomical instruction—particularly the annual public anatomy lesson, in which a human corpse was dissected—had a much longer tradition in Amsterdam than in The Hague. The privilege granted to the Amsterdam surgeons’ guild to hold a yearly dissection of an executed criminal dated from 1555, and the guild prided itself on the fact that a thief had been dissected there as early as 1550. The man’s skin had been embalmed so skilfully that it still graced the guildhall in Ruysch’s day. Louis de Bils had cast doubt on its authenticity, but according to the Amsterdam surgeons, this was sour grapes, for De Bils’s preparations were ‘very badly decayed in places’. The guild’s specimen had been described in a chronicle of Amsterdam as smooth and intact.3

2 The Hague Municipal Archives, notarial archive 593a, fol. 102, 30 October 1665. According to the conditions agreed upon when Hendrik married, Anna van Berchem received money from an annuity taken out on Petronella Ruysch (notarial archive 329, 29 May 1660). 3 Commelin, Beschrijvinge van Amsterdam II, 652.

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At first the annual dissections were performed by experienced guildbrothers, but since 1578 a doctor of medicine had been designated as the praelector in charge of the anatomical demonstrations, which took place in the theatrum anatomicum on the floor above the Butchers’ Hall in the former chapel of the Convent of St Margaret (SintMargarethaklooster), which had been seized in 1578 by the Protestant authorities. In addition to performing dissections, the praelector was expected to instruct the surgeons in anatomical theory. These classes took place twice a week in the room used by the surgeons’ guild in the Weigh House on the Nieuwmarkt. Frederik Ruysch accepted the offer and was formally appointed praelector on 29 December. His annual salary was set at 350 guilders. On 12 January 1667 he went to Amsterdam for his first meeting with the officers of the guild, and two weeks later his appointment was confirmed by the town council. Ruysch’s appointment was in keeping with the authorities’ ambition to improve and reorganize medical care in the city. Until this time, the post of praelector had been viewed mainly as an honorary office. The previous praelector had combined the position with a number of others, but now it was hoped that Ruysch would devote himself to his educational task. The driving force behind his appointment had been the physician and burgomaster Claas Pietersz Tulp. For years Tulp himself had served as praelector, and it was in this capacity that Rembrandt had depicted him in a painting that decorated the guildhall. Tulp, who was a generation older than Ruysch, had received his doctorate long before Harvey had come up with his theory of blood circulation. Even so, in Leiden he had been taught by a progressive instructor, a follower of Vesalius, who had given demonstrations in the anatomical theatre. Tulp, who had made a name for himself as an observational anatomist with a keen eye, had once said: ‘Nothing can be incontrovertible that is not grounded in reason. Even less so can medical knowledge be certain, if it is not confirmed by experience.’ Observation surpassed the teachings of all masters, according to Tulp, who had found a kindred spirit in Ruysch.4 As a politician, Tulp was no heavyweight, but he had been on the town council for so long that he was now the oldest member, and as

4 Tulp, dedication in De drie boecken der medicijnsche aanmerkingen (Amsterdam, 1650).

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such wielded a certain amount of authority. Not only had he exerted pressure on the guild officers to nominate Ruysch, but he had persuaded his colleagues, the other three incumbent burgomasters, to hire him. Naturally Ruysch was honoured to receive the appointment, but it was a mixed blessing, for the Amsterdam surgeons’ guild was a notorious snake pit, and had been embroiled in controversies in recent years. In 1665 there had been a violent quarrel between the guild officers and the hospital surgeons, one of whom was Job van Meekeren, a protégé of Tulp and the above-mentioned recipient of Ruysch’s embalmed uterus. Rumours of corruption further tarnished the officers’ reputation. Tulp was well aware of this, and warned Ruysch not to fraternize with them, because they were ‘a bunch of drunken scoundrels’.5 As the candidate of Tulp and Van Meekeren (who had meanwhile died, but was known to have praised Ruysch as an unrivalled and unusually ‘sensitive’ dissectionist), Ruysch had started off on the wrong foot. His predecessor, Jan Deijman, who had sided with the guild officers, had been a rather undistinguished anatomist, yet he had exerted a great deal of influence on the Amsterdam medical world in his other capacity as head physician at the hospital. Deijman had been, above all, well-connected. It was impossible to exercise any authority in the guild without the support of the incumbent politicians, so it was particularly unfortunate that Ruysch, an outsider in need of friends, found himself bereft of all political protection soon after taking up his post, for Tulp’s faction lost their seats in the 1667 elections. Few would have been able to cope in the position in which Ruysch now found himself. Matthew Slade, the first candidate put forward to succeed Deijman, had declined the honour. Slade, a native of Amsterdam, had been named after his English grandfather, a fanatical Puritan, who had fled to Amsterdam and become headmaster of a Latin School. Young Matthew had studied medicine in Leiden, and after receiving his doctorate had set up a medical practice in Amsterdam. He was indeed versatile: not only did he frequent the best barber-surgeon’s shop in the city, but he was also known as a man of great erudition,

5 ‘Ruysch once told me this himself’, wrote the well-informed author of the 1677 pamphlet Luijelack.

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who had written a critique of William Harvey’s research. The previous year he had declined an exceptionally generous offer from Leiden University, but had consented to take over Deijman’s position as chief physician at the Amsterdam hospital. The hospital regents were willing to appoint Slade ‘provided he come every day in the summer before 7 a.m. and in the winter before 8 a.m. to make his sick rounds’.6 A difficult task lay ahead of Ruysch, a ‘stranger’ who, in the opinion of many officers, had been foisted upon the guild. Up to this time, reputable physicians from Amsterdam had acted as praelector. As a former apothecary from The Hague, Ruysch could not count on their good will. Medical Bastions The three main groups in the medical world were organized hierarchically and maintained strict divisions of labour. At the top of the pyramid were the doctores medicinae, physicians with university degrees. Their expertise theoretically encompassed the whole of medical science, but their academic education did not include a course of practical training. A physician merely diagnosed diseases: if a remedy was thought necessary, he wrote a prescription for an apothecary; if practical intervention was required, he called in a surgeon. Doctor medicinae was a free profession; one only needed a degree to set up a medical practice. Unlike the surgeons, doctors of medicine were not bound by guild regulations. Surgeons were artisans, who had learned their trade in practice and were authorized to treat external diseases and ailments. They could treat many complaints on their own, but they often operated under a physician’s supervision. In addition to performing surgery, surgeons dressed wounds and performed phlebotomies. Phlebotomy, or bloodletting, was based on the prevailing notion that the bodily fluids in healthy individuals were in balance. An excess or tainting of the fluids was thought to cause an imbalance, which led in turn to the symptoms observed in the patient. Sometimes it was possible to combat the harmful substance directly by administering medicines, but usually attempts were made to restore the balance by means of blood-letting.

6

Amsterdam City Archives, hospital archive 1017.

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An English surgeon, who had become a prisoner of war in 1666, remarked that the surgeons in Holland were usually ‘barbers and men of small note’.7 In Amsterdam, too, most of the surgeons were small tradesmen: at their ‘shops’ they dressed wounds, set broken bones, and treated ulcers and growths. A customer could go to a barber-surgeon not only for salves, bandages and oils, but also simply for a shave and a haircut. A surgeon received his training as the apprentice of a master-surgeon. After learning how to read, write and do sums, a boy went to live with a qualified surgeon and paid a fee to be allowed to work in his shop. Although apprentices were meant to learn the basic skills during this period, they were often little more than helpers who shaved and powdered faces and dressed superficial wounds. Even when they accompanied the master-surgeon on his sick rounds, they were not always informed of the hows and whys of the treatments they witnessed. When their initial period of training was over, apprentices were given a certificate, after which they could spend the rest of their apprenticeship working as the master’s assistant for a modest salary. What apprentices actually learned about surgery depended largely on the master’s knowledge and capabilities and his willingness to instruct. Truly competent master-surgeons with a thorough command of all branches of surgery were rare and therefore able to command high fees. Even though the guild was powerful and disinclined to change the status quo, the authorities did all they could to raise the level of instruction. In 1664 the compulsory term of apprenticeship was set at five years. With the arrival of Ruysch, more emphasis was placed on anatomical knowledge, and all surgeons-in-training were required to attend twice-weekly lessons in anatomy. This course formed a precedent, for no other guild required general vocational training in addition to the instruction given by the master. Many surgeons were unhappy with this arrangement, because it meant that their assistants were sometimes absent from the shop. After the required period of training, assistants could attempt a master-proof before the officers of the guild, though not all of them did so. Those who passed this examination were qualified to open up shops of their own, but in Amsterdam the law required surgeons with

7

Poynter, Journal Yonge, 103.

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their own practice to be members of the guild. Like all guilds, the surgeons’ guild was mainly a professional organization that protected its members from outside competition. The surgeons were represented by six officers (overlieden), who constituted the governing board of the guild. The composition of the board changed yearly. Every September, two of the six officers stepped down, and two new officers were chosen by the burgomasters from among those nominated by the remaining four officers. The vacant positions on the governing board were thus filled by co-optation based on a system of rotation. The two retiring officers were chosen again a year later, which meant that a club of eight held sway in the guild, and their interests did not lie primarily in the advancement of their profession: on the contrary, they were mainly concerned with safeguarding their income. Like the surgeons, the apothecaries were bound by guild regulations; furthermore, they were under the direct supervision of the physicians. Their interests were promoted by a relatively new institution, the Collegium Medicum, located next to the anatomical theatre. The Collegium Medicum consisted of three physicians and two apothecaries, who were appointed by the city government. The Collegium had been established primarily as a means of subordinating the apothecaries to the physicians, but it had grown into a supervisory body that was consulted by the authorities in all medical matters. It was therefore a powerful organization: its members occupied special pews in church and were invited to the annual banquet held by the town council. The chairman of the Collegium Medicum could exert a great deal of influence on government policy; he was, after Tulp, the second most important man in the medical sector. It was fortunate for Ruysch that the Collegium Medicum was headed by Willem Piso, formerly Prince Maurits of Nassau’s personal physician, who had travelled to Brazil with Frans Post, the brother of Ruysch’s father-in-law.8 The surgeons’ guild and the Collegium Medicum were only two of the medical bastions Ruysch had to deal with. The third was the municipal hospital, the Sint-Pietersgasthuis. Officially it was under the authority of the city government, but its daily management was actually in the hands of a board consisting of six minor officials called regents. The hospital was intended for those who were seriously ill but could not

8

See Van Overbeke, Anecdota, 46.

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afford medical help and had no family to care for them. Such people were in plentiful supply, as evidenced by the multitude of hospital patients, sometimes as many as a thousand. The hospital employed a number of physicians and surgeons, as well as an apothecary. Hospital positions were sought after because they provided doctors with a permanent salary and put them in a good position to supplement their income. Their patients were, in fact, a gold mine: abundant in number, they were in no position to make demands. Those who suffered from curious complaints were visited by all kinds of interested persons, and the surgeons did not hesitate to exploit this situation. Those wishing to observe clinical practice paid 50 to 60 guilders for the privilege, while those hoping to gain hands-on experience paid anywhere from 100 to 150 guilders for a course.9 For an anatomist like Ruysch, the hospital was a potential source of ‘material’: not only did one in seven patients die, but many of the deceased were nameless and therefore potential candidates for dissection. Bodies that were not collected for burial within three days were labelled ‘dead strangers’ and put at the disposal of the hospital doctors. A small annex housed the hospital’s dissecting room, intended for post-mortem examinations of deceased patients. The hospital physicians preferred to carry out these examinations themselves, but now and then they were forced to yield to an outsider, a doctor to whom the authorities had granted permission to perform surgery or carry out anatomical research. This had to be done discreetly: it was forbidden to dissect the corpses publicly or to purloin body parts. Afterwards the entire body had to be properly coffined and buried. Shortly before Ruysch’s appointment, a fourth institution of importance to Amsterdam’s medical world had come into being, for in January a professor of medicine had been appointed at the Athenaeum Illustre.10 Before this, there had been fierce opposition to the establishment of this professorship. At one point during the Dutch Revolt, when Amsterdam was still under Spanish rule, Leiden had been granted a monopoly on academic education in the province of Holland, and Amsterdam had had to make do with an ‘athenaeum’, where it was possible to study but 9

Hospital physician Pieter Guenellon to John Locke, 23 February 1693, Corr. Locke IV, 641. 10 For a history of academic medicine in Amsterdam, see Mooij, Doctors of Amsterdam.

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not to obtain a degree. Over the protests of Leiden, the Athenaeum Illustre was founded in 1632 and housed in the former Chapel of St Agnes (Agnietenkapel), near the municipal hospital. One of the events held to mark its opening was an anatomy lesson given by Claas Tulp, which was immortalized by Rembrandt. The fact that Rembrandt was a native of Leiden was symbolic, since the Athenaeum was the selfappointed rival of the University of Leiden. By expanding its curriculum, the Athenaeum came more and more to resemble a university, but it still had far fewer students than Leiden. Not all subjects were taught in Amsterdam, and the lack of a professor of medicine had been due mainly to the resistance of the surgeons, who viewed anatomical instruction as an acquired right of the surgeons’ guild. Nevertheless, some anatomy was taught at the Athenaeum, not by an anatomist, but by Arnold Senguerd, a lecturer in physics. Senguerd had participated in the debate about the circulation of the blood, and had performed vivisections to show that the septum in the heart was impermeable. After a while he had acquired an assistant, who lectured on medical doctrine and chemistry and eventually also anatomy. His name was Gerard Blaes. Because his father had served as court architect to the King of Denmark, Gerard Blaes had studied in Copenhagen before coming to Leiden to obtain his doctorate in philosophy and medicine. He had set up a medical practice in Amsterdam, where he also gave private lessons. In 1659 he was appointed lecturer at the Athenaeum, then still an unsalaried position. Recommended by Tulp and Senguerd, Blaes was appointed adjunct professor in 1660. Although his chemistry lessons were disparaged by Niels Stensen as ‘pointless daily chemistry exercises’, they were actually on a level suited to an institution like the Athenaeum, which prepared pupils for university.11 In the subject of anatomy, Blaes was allowed at first to give theoretical instruction only, but in 1662 he was granted permission to dissect the occasional corpse at the hospital for the benefit of his private students. Professor Senguerd advised his students to attend those lessons, so anatomy gradually crept into the curriculum, until in January 1666 Gerard Blaes became the first full professor of medicine at the Athenaeum—on the condition that he give no public anatomy lessons.

11

Beukers, ‘Publycque lessen’, 323.

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In addition to the courses offered by official institutions, various kinds of private medical instruction were available in Amsterdam, and there was also an informal research group, whose guiding light was Jan Swammerdam. After his sojourn in France, Swammerdam had returned in September 1665 to his parents’ home in Amsterdam. Inspired by his experience in Paris, where he had attended the scholarly gatherings held at the home of Melchisedec Thévenot, he joined a small group of Amsterdam physicians, who met every week to engage in joint research. Jan Swammerdam was convinced of the benefit of collaboration, as was Niels Stensen, who had studied with him in Leiden and accompanied him to the Paris gatherings. ‘We shall remain ignorant’, Stensen had declared in 1664, ‘if we follow the authors of antiquity instead of combining our work, diligence and study to arrive at some knowledge of the truth, which must be the principal goal of those who reason and study in good faith.’ Swammerdam, too, thought that the investigation of nature should be a collaborative effort, since it was obvious that ‘one person alone can do but very little’.12 Swammerdam was the heart and soul of the Amsterdam group, together with his best friend Matthew Slade, whose post as head physician at the hospital enabled him to make research facilities available to Swammerdam and his associates. In the mid-seventeenth century, research based on observation and experimentation was certainly not a widely accepted approach. At many European universities, the professors continued to rely on outdated teaching material, and the spirit of Aristotle still prevailed. Students were told to read Galen and Hippocrates, and given instruction in the doctrine of the four humours. In some cities, however, scientists banded together to carry out joint research. In Florence in 1657, the Accademia del Cimento (the ‘Academy of the Test’) had been founded by scientists who preferred to garner knowledge from experimentation rather than from the writings of Aristotle. In England science blossomed under the Puritan government. In Cambridge the work of Descartes was discussed and more attention was paid to the subject of anatomy. Students read not only the classical texts, but also the work of Harvey and Bartholin. The real research was done outside academia, however, in particular by an informal society in London that

12 See Vugs, Stensen, 221–223, and Schierbeek, Swammerdam, 106. On Stensen and Swammerdam, see Kooijmans, Gevaarlijke kennis.

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was called the Invisible College because it lacked a fixed meeting place. In 1662 this group, which revolved around Robert Boyle, gave birth to the Royal Society of London for the Improving of Natural Knowledge, an institution devoted to the advancement of science through experimentation and organized research. Its royal patronage meant little in financial terms, but the group was well organized. Members were asked to suggest fields of research and to publish their observations in the Philosophical Transactions, which appeared from 1665 onwards. The society actively sought correspondents abroad. In 1666 the Académie des Sciences was founded in Paris. This institution had salaried members, one of whom was Christiaan Huygens, who had been asked to become secretary. Their findings were published in the Journal des Sçavans. In the Netherlands, there was less need for scientific institutions of this kind, because modern research was carried out largely (though not exclusively) at the universities. Many research scientists worked independently or on an ad hoc basis, often in conjunction with an institution. In Amsterdam scientific life revolved mainly around the Athenaeum, but research and instruction were largely decentralized. Although the various medical bastions all claimed their share, there was room for private initiative: interested individuals could attend lectures at the Athenaeum, for example, and Athenaeum students could supplement their schooling with private lessons. Various physicians gave private instruction, either at home or at the institution to which they were bound. Swammerdam’s group was merely one such private initiative, being tied to the Athenaeum only through the participation of several of Gerard Blaes’s students and sometimes Blaes himself. An Established Anatomist On 22 February 1667 the body of a man who had been condemned to death and hanged at the Admiralty was put at the disposal of the surgeons’ guild. The corpse was delivered to the anatomical theatre, where Ruysch was given the opportunity to dissect it in public. These anatomy lessons were theoretically intended to instruct the surgeons, but as early as 1606 the great public interest in such dissections had prompted the authorities to impose regulations. These rules reveal that a public dissection was, first and foremost, a spectacle, and that its educational function was of secondary importance. To begin with, many of

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the surgeons could not understand the commentary, because unlike the ordinary lessons, public demonstrations were conducted in Latin. Moreover, the seating was based on the social hierarchy, with the best places reserved for physicians, master-surgeons and city magistrates. Regents and clergymen were admitted free of charge. Surgeons-intraining had to watch from afar, from their places amid the general public, who were required to pay a modest entrance fee. Children were not admitted. Spectators were forbidden to move about, talk, laugh, or make off with body parts. Those asking questions were advised to avoid ‘scorn and ridicule’.13 A public anatomy lesson generally lasted from three to five days, depending on the temperature. The proceeds went to the guild, which viewed the lesson chiefly as a source of income and an opportunity to enhance the profession’s standing. Seen in this light, Frederik Ruysch’s first anatomical demonstration was a success, since it generated a great deal of interest. One reason was that his predecessor, Jan Deijman, had given very few public demonstrations, and since 1659 none at all. This enabled Ruysch to make a spectacular entrance, giving an anatomy lesson that lasted six whole days and earned the guild almost as much money as the final anatomy lesson given by Claas Tulp in 1650. Ruysch had made a name for himself in Amsterdam. The poet Hendrik de Graef devoted a grandiloquent poem to his anatomical arts, and the physician Jan Baptist van Lamzweerde, who called him an ‘erudite and very skilful anatomical artist’, dedicated to Ruysch his translation of a book by the English anatomist Thomas Willis.14 Referring to the latest Anglo-Dutch war, Van Lamzweerde wrote: ‘I make so bold as to dedicate to you in these troubled times an Englishman in Dutch attire.’ Ten years later he would regret this noble gesture, but for the time being it was a sign that Ruysch was a force to be reckoned with. In the meantime, Maria Post had given birth to their second daughter, whom they named Anna, after Frederik’s mother.15 The family left The Hague and took up residence in a house in Amsterdam, on the 13

Amsterdam City Archives, surgeons’ guild archive 229. Hendrik de Graaf, Op de mensch ontleding door de uijtstekende geneesheer Fredericus Ruysch (Amsterdam, 1667); Thomas Willis, Verklaringe van de oorsaack van het beweegen der spieren (Amsterdam, 1667). 15 Frederik Ruysch also had an aunt named Anna, who acted as a baptismal witness, together with his father-in-law, Pieter Post, his brother-in-law Philip de Milly and his sister-in-law Elisabeth Post. 14

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Nieuwezijds Achterburgwal, not far from the Town Hall, above the municipal stables.16 Hardened Wax While Ruysch was making his entrance in Amsterdam, Swammerdam was in the process of discovering an important new method of preparation. Swammerdam, now in his late twenties, was still living at home with his widowed father, who thought it high time that his son set up in medical practice. In October 1666 Swammerdam therefore left for Leiden to finish his dissertation and obtain his doctorate. Meanwhile he continued his research into methods of preparation. During the sixteenth century, various people had experimented with ways to fill vessels with fluid, and in 1651 Harvey had demonstrated the circulation of the blood by injecting fluid into the right ventricle of the heart, which then flowed via the lungs to the left ventricle. Initially copper tubes were used to fill the blood vessels with fluid, but the difficulties this presented induced Reinier de Graaf to come up with a syringe that made it possible to fill all the blood vessels in the body in a single day. To highlight the vascular system, De Graaf thought it best to inject coloured substances. He recommended putting a copper coin or copper filings in ‘spirits of ammonia’ to obtain a nice blue liquid. Alternatively, one could simply soak violets, cornflowers or roses in water. Ruysch later recounted how De Graaf used the syringe: first he removed the blood from the vessels, then filled them with coloured liquid to make them visible. Although this method was rather satisfactory at first, it was later rejected, because the substances kept flowing out again, which meant that a body part injected with a liquid substance could not be dissected or preserved permanently.17 On 21 January 1667, Swammerdam demonstrated his discovery to Jan van Horne by injecting wax into the vessels of a uterus. He had probably arrived at this technique after reading a 1663 article by Robert Boyle, who had suggested using substances that liquefy when heated but solidify upon cooling. Boyle had attempted to preserve

16

In November 1667 Ruysch rented a house above the municipal stables for 250 guilders a year (Amsterdam City Archives, treasurer’s accounts, 10 April 1669). 17 AW (Frederik Ruysch, Alle de Werken) 1093; De Graaf, Korte beschrijving van ’t gebruijk der spuijt in d’ontleedtkonst, in De Graaf, Alle de wercken, 659–669.

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insects by immersing them in warm turpentine, which he then allowed to harden: ‘Perhaps there may be some way to keep the arteries & the veins too, when they are empty’d of blood, plump, and unapt to shrink over much, by filling them betimes with some such substance, as, though fluid enough when it is injected to run into the branches of the vessels, will afterwards quickly grow hard.’18 Van Horne likely picked up on this idea and urged Swammerdam to try it. Instead of injecting the usual fluids, Swammerdam heated white wax and injected it into the vessels in its liquid state. After cooling, the hardened wax remained in the vessels. The result was staggering. Swammerdam had already shown it to Matthew Slade, and had won high praise when he presented a wax-filled liver at Leiden’s theatrum anatomicum. Swammerdam also showed Ruysch what he had done.19 Like Ruysch, he drained the blood from the vessels, then pushed away the valves, and finally used a syringe to inject the liquid wax into the vena cava. At first he had used only white wax, but he subsequently experimented with coloured wax. In the prepared uterus he used different colours for veins and arteries by adding red, yellow and green dyes to white wax. This colouring technique had been the brainchild of Johannes Hudde, a famous mathematician and physicist who also assisted the anatomists by producing another important tool, the lens. The secret of research scientists like Ruysch and Swammerdam was finesse: unravelling the secrets of the human body meant observing things that were scarcely visible to the naked eye. To begin with, it was important to have as much light as possible. The lack of any source of artificial light but candles and fire made it necessary to carry out much research in daylight. Even in bright sunlight, however, the acuity of the human eye could be increased by using lenses. Early in the seventeenth century it had been discovered that small objects could be greatly magnified by viewing them through a glass lens or a combination of two or three lenses. The effect was spectacular, but it was by no means easy to carry out research with such lenses. Scientists encountered a variety of problems, posed by the nature of the light, the quality of the glass, and the lens-grinding techniques. An object viewed through a lens could appear to have coloured edges, for example, and the image was not uniformly sharp. Nor was the working of lenses fully understood. Tra-

18 19

Boyle, Works III, 307–309. AW 1096.

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ditional explanations of sight assumed that an image of the object was somehow conveyed to the eye. It was not until around 1650 that theories based on the work of Descartes, who held that light consisted of particles, began to gain ground. Johannes Hudde, Christiaan Huygens and Baruch Spinoza were intensely occupied by the study of light and the grinding of lenses. They discussed their respective experiences, but the difficulties were not easily overcome; on the contrary, they were aggravated by using a combination of lenses, which is why single-lens microscopes often worked better than compound models. Hudde experimented with a microscope that contained a single, very small—and therefore very powerful—convex lens. In 1663 he wrote to Christiaan Huygens to express his satisfaction: ‘I wanted to know (because this is the point) if I couldn’t see more distinctly through it, I mean to say, if I could distinguish more parts in the same object, because for that purpose I think this lens is optimal. I am also certain that I have never seen a microscope of two or more lenses that could equal the clarity of this single-lens variety.’20 Clearly, Hudde was enthusiastic, but Huygens thought that the single-lens microscope lacked depth of field. It was also difficult to use, because it had to be held very close to both the object and the eye. Frederik Ruysch found the distortion and lack of clarity a major drawback, and soon placed more faith in what he could discover by means of wax injections. After all, he could show his preparations to others, whereas scientists who worked with microscopes often found it difficult to share their observations with those unused to the instruments. Among the few to overcome these obstacles satisfactorily was the Italian scientist Marcello Malpighi, who studied anatomy systematically with a compound microscope. In 1661 Malpighi found the missing link in Harvey’s theory, when he cut a piece of lung out of a frog, laid it under the microscope, and observed the capillaries, which made it clear exactly how blood circulated. In 1665 the Englishman Robert Hooke published a book on microscopes, Micrographia, in which he expressed the conviction that the internal structure of organisms could be discovered with the microscope, though the number of scientists who could handle them effectively was still limited. Apart from Malpighi, one such adept was Jan Swammerdam.

20 Christiaan Huygens, Oeuvres V, 309. See Fournier, Swammerdam, and Ruestow, Microscope.

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The day before Ruysch gave his first public anatomy lesson in Amsterdam, Jan Swammerdam received his doctorate in Leiden, having written his dissertation on the respiratory system, which he had investigated at the beginning of his studies. It was research done in the spirit of Descartes, based on a mechanistic view of the human organism. Returning to Amsterdam, he refused to become a medical practitioner, as his father wished; instead, he continued his research. (His friend Matthew Slade was similarly inclined. In October 1668 he wrote a two-line letter to the hospital regents, asking them to offer his job to another physician and to keep the money they still owed him.21) Swammerdam devoted a lot of time to his study of insects, constantly collecting them in the ditches, ponds and marshes near Amsterdam. When dissecting the creatures, he followed the advice of Johannes Hudde and used very small semi-spherical pieces of glass, blown specially for this purpose. He had an adjustable, custom-made table and tiny scissors and knives, which could be sharpened only in bright sunlight and with the aid of a magnifying glass. In the attic of his father’s house, Swammerdam lavished attention on his insects. Like Ruysch, he also collected anatomical preparations, but while these were the crowning glory of Ruysch’s collection, in Swammerdam’s case it was the other way around. His study of insects did, however, promote methods of preservation suitable to human cadavers. Swammerdam was accustomed to suffocating his insects in oil of turpentine. Submerging them for a time in this oil kept them soft (thus facilitating dissection) and prevented decay. It was easy to remove the fat in their intestines, once it had been dissolved in oil of turpentine. Failure to remove the fat caused it to dry like slaked lime, ‘which covers everything to the extent that the intestines lie buried beneath it and cannot be seen at all’, according to Swammerdam, who could spend an entire day removing the fat from a caterpillar in order to study the creature’s heart. Swammerdam tested the efficacy of oil of turpentine in preserving human body parts, letting them stand in it for several months, until the oil had replaced the bodily fluids. In 1669 he used this method

21

Amsterdam City Archives, hospital archive 1059.

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to preserve the corpse of a one-month-old boy. He also succeeded in embalming an entire lamb. Although Ruysch often exchanged results with Slade and Swammerdam, he did not join their research group. His temperament and working methods were not suited to collaboration. Moreover, he was put off by the presence of Gerard Blaes, who did not hesitate to take credit for the work of others. As mentioned earlier, Blaes had attempted to claim a discovery made by Niels Stensen, and this was generally known in the scientific community. He also appropriated the findings of Swammerdam’s research group, publishing results and illustrations of research done by Swammerdam and giving no credit to either Swammerdam or his group. Swammerdam grudgingly tolerated this, and countenanced similar behaviour from Jan van Horne, with whom he had carried out joint research in Leiden. Although Swammerdam had done all the work, Van Horne had provided the necessary facilities. This was the consequence of Swammerdam’s lifestyle: his lack of a salaried position made him dependent on people like Blaes and Van Horne. Swammerdam wrote to Niels Stensen, who had left for Italy, to say that he should not take it amiss if discoveries they had made together were published by Van Horne. Niels Stensen, by contrast, had found himself a proper patron. After staying with Swammerdam at Thévenot’s house in France, he had gone to Florence, where—at Thévenot’s recommendation—he had entered the service of Ferdinando de’ Medici, Grand Duke of Tuscany. Ferdinando, who had been tutored by Galileo and was a benefactor of the Accademia del Cimento, installed Stensen in an apartment in the Palazzo Vecchio and paid him a salary, so that he could devote himself to research. In return Stensen was expected to build up a collection of naturalia for the Palazzo Pitti. When the Accademia del Cimento was closed in 1667, Italian scientists began to seek more contact with their foreign counterparts, who no longer thought it essential to attend Italian universities. Niels Stensen and Henry Oldenburg, secretary of the Royal Society, acted as intermediaries. In January 1668 the son of Stensen’s patron, twentyfive-year-old Cosimo de’ Medici, paid a visit to Amsterdam.22 Cosimo bought paintings by Willem van Aelst and Otto Marseus, and before leaving for Leiden, where he planned to see the botanical garden and

22

Hoogewerff, Twee reizen, 79–80.

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the anatomical theatre, he visited the anatomists Dirk Kerckrink and Frederik Ruysch. Ruysch gave an anatomical demonstration for Cosimo and showed him his collection. Cosimo was particularly impressed by the body of an eleven-year-old boy, prepared by Ruysch in such a way that it resembled a sleeping child. Dried-out, mummified corpses were not unknown, but this was something else entirely. What made its fresh appearance even more amazing was the fact that Ruysch had prepared the body back in 1666, the year in which he had embalmed the English admiral William Berkeley. When Cosimo visited Jan Swammerdam, he was treated to the dissection of a caterpillar. Swammerdam was able to show the wings of the butterfly rolled up inside, thus becoming the first to demonstrate how caterpillars undergo metamorphosis. With surprising skill he cut the butterfly out of the caterpillar and unfolded it. The young duke was impressed, and afterwards announced his intention to buy the entire collection of insects. He offered 12,000 guilders for it, but on the condition—and this was no doubt the real reason for his proposal— that Swammerdam bring the collection to Florence and enter the service of the court. It was a tempting offer, for Swammerdam would then be reunited with Niels Stensen, who had probably concocted this plan to lure him to Florence. But he knew that Stensen had meanwhile become a Roman Catholic, and he was not prepared to follow his example. The life of a courtier did not appeal to him either, so he politely refused the offer. Professorship While the unemployed Jan Swammerdam remained at home with his father and Niels Stensen was enjoying princely patronage, Frederik Ruysch’s opportunities for research were secured through government action. The Amsterdam authorities had decided to place the midwives under the supervision of the Collegium Medicum, and Ruysch was ordered to administer examinations to all of them—even those with years of professional experience. This test of their anatomical knowledge naturally presupposed some degree of literacy. As of 31 May 1668, all practising midwives were required to have passed this examination, which was administered at the Collegium Medicum every Monday and Thursday at 2 p.m. Midwives-in-training could sit the exam only

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after serving a four-year apprenticeship. As with all changes in which vested interests are at stake, this change met with resistance—primarily from the midwives themselves, though others objected as well. The surgeons’ guild, for example, disapproved of the physicians’ supervisory role, because midwifery had traditionally belonged to their field of expertise. Moreover, the obvious candidate for the post of examiner was the municipal obstetrician, Hendrik van Roonhuijsen, who was responsible for teaching the midwives. His instruction, however, was confined to tips regarding difficult deliveries, and doubtless this blasé approach to his duties had been a reason for passing him over. In addition to this appointment, Frederik Ruysch was granted the title of professor of anatomy. It was a private professorship, with no connection to the Athenaeum. For both parties this was the perfect solution to a problem that would undoubtedly arise, for Ruysch’s growing reputation meant that he would inevitably be offered a chair at Leiden or some other university. The city did not want to lose him, nor did he want to leave, since a university post did not really suit him. Like Swammerdam, he was devoted to research, and although he had a great deal of experience, he had never undertaken the wide reading expected of a university lecturer. In Amsterdam he could continue to do what he liked best, and now he would not be tempted to leave for the sake of gaining an academic title. One thing that could have tempted Ruysch to leave Amsterdam was a higher salary. A title was all very well, but he also wanted to earn more. A good occasion to request a salary increase soon presented itself: on 21 April 1668, Maritje Roelofs was ‘strangled with the rope’. As a native of Bergen in Norway, she was a ‘stranger’—a foreigner no less—and therefore suitable for dissection. Her execution drew a huge crowd, as such events usually did. While the scaffold was being erected before the Town Hall, people flooded into Dam Square. The following day they also flocked to the anatomical theatre, where Ruysch gave a demonstration, the first in a five-day series of public anatomy lessons. Again, the receipts for the guild were high. In that respect the officers were satisfied with their professor, but not for long, since Ruysch immediately asked for a pay rise. Because his predecessors had been more interested in honour than remuneration, the salary of an anatomy lecturer was rather modest. Ruysch took his job seriously, however, and wanted an income comparable to what he could earn elsewhere. In August he was promised an increase in salary. The guild submitted a request to the burgomasters, who raised Ruysch’s salary

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from 350 to 750 guilders. The city paid half the increase, but the guild had to foot the bill for the other half.23 This ensured Ruysch of facilities, for he now earned enough to finance his anatomical research, which was attracting more and more attention. In September Ruysch was visited by a young physician who was already an experienced dissectionist: Edward Browne, the eldest son of the famous English physician and writer Thomas Browne. On his journey through Holland, young Browne first stopped at Leiden, Delft and Rotterdam, where he met Adolf Visscher, a physician who had studied in Leiden at the same time as Ruysch. Now a medical practitioner in Amsterdam, Visscher introduced Browne to Gerard Blaes, Frederik Ruysch and Jan Swammerdam. In a letter to his father, Browne gave an account of his Dutch adventure, telling of his visit to the anatomical theatre in Leiden and describing the many skeletons exhibited there, as well as several embalmed preparations, some of which were the work of De Bils. He had seen ‘divers skeletons of men and women, some with muscle, one with the whole flesh and skin, but I have since seen far neater curiosities of this kind at Amsterdam, performed by dr. Ruysch’. Ruysch had shown Browne various anatomical curiosities, including skeletons of young children and foetuses in various stages of development. He had also shown him the valves in the lymph vessels and a liver in which extremely fine vessels were visible. Browne had seen preparations of muscles and even of entire bodies. The most amazing thing in the whole collection, he said, was the face of the child that had made such an impression on Cosimo de’ Medici earlier that year. The complexion was completely natural in colour, and the child seemed merely asleep. In Brown’s view, that was the biggest difference between Ruysch and De Bils: ‘the preserving of the face, without the least spot or change of colour or alteration of countenance from what it is immediately after death’.24 De Bils had definitely lost the competition. Since his confrontation with Ruysch, he had withdrawn to Sluis. Reinier de Graaf had

23 The increase was justified by pointing out that Ruysch had been both a physician and an apothecary in The Hague, and had given up his work there to become praelector. It was also stated that his appointment had been very advantageous to the guild, and by raising his salary, they hoped to allow Ruysch ‘to continue in his diligence’. The burgomasters’ decision was ratified on 11 August 1668. 24 British Library, London, Sloane MS 1861. In his notes, Edward Browne wrote that he visited ‘dr. Reus’ on 17 September 1668. The following day he went to see Swammerdam (Sloane MS 1908). See Van Strien, British Travellers.

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meanwhile demonstrated the art of bloodless dissection. Using live animals, he ligated the vessels and hid the traces of his intervention before admitting the audience to the theatre, for in his own words: ‘If this is performed with some measure of dexterity, it will seem like sorcery to many.’25 Still, De Bils was appointed honorary professor of anatomy at the Illustere School in Den Bosch, where in August 1669, De Bils gave his inaugural demonstration, to be followed by a series of public anatomy lessons. The lessons were discontinued, however, when he ‘collapsed of debility, still being weak from his previous illness’. He probably had tuberculosis, and his condition had been aggravated (according to a physician friend) by the many slanderous charges made against him. He died shortly thereafter, but not before recording the secret of his preparation methods in two notarial acts and giving his son the right to make use of them. His son, who succeeded him as bailiff of Aardenburg and would later become burgomaster of Tholen, was not at all interested in his father’s line of work. De Bils’s widow, Elisabeth van Peene, tried to sell her late husband’s secret to the city of Amsterdam. Ruysch was later blamed for robbing the poor widow of her livelihood, but as soon as he got wind of the intended transaction, he intervened, telling the authorities that if they had need of embalmed bodies, he was their man. He assured them that his embalming method was superior to De Bils’s, and if they did not believe it, they were welcome to come and inspect his specimens. Not surprisingly, the deal with De Bils’s widow was called off.26 Anatomy Lesson The authorities, determined to make Amsterdam a centre of modern science, persevered in their search for celebrities. Ruysch was not their only star by any means; in fact, he had quite a few rivals. One of them, recruited to teach at the Athenaeum, was Johannes de Raey, said by Johannes Hudde, who had studied under him, to be the most important Cartesian philosopher.27 Tulp, too, is thought to have had a hand 25

De Graaf, Alle de wercken, 666–667. Leer om leer, 6. The will was published in Jansma, De Bils. In 1707 De Bils continued to enjoy a certain reputation. In his description of Ruysch’s art of embalming, a German physician mentioned De Bils as someone who appeared to have an excellent understanding of the art (Erndtl, Relation). 27 Bontemantel, Regeeringe II, 524. 26

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in the appointment of De Raey, who was lured away from Leiden— where he had taught philosophy and medicine since 1653—by the promise of the exceptionally high salary of 2,500 guilders. Perhaps he also expected to enjoy more freedom in Amsterdam, for at Leiden the dissemination of Cartesian thought was still hotly debated, since many feared it would have an adverse effect on religion. De Raey had experienced relatively few problems, however, because he confined himself to physics and proved to be a moderate who attempted to reconcile Cartesian philosophy with Aristotelian thought. The Amsterdam authorities undoubtedly expected De Raey to defend his moderate views of Descartes against Spinoza and his radical sympathizers, who were causing quite a stir in the city. The physicians considered the appointment an interesting development, given the close ties between natural science and medicine. But despite De Raey’s keen interest in medicine and anatomy, he thought physics of a higher order than medicine. He therefore preferred to leave medical instruction to Gerard Blaes,28 in whose field the authorities had also attempted to modernize education by putting six hospital beds at his disposal for hands-on instruction. Blaes was even allowed to conduct post mortems on the patients who died in ‘his’ beds. To round off the medical curriculum at the Athenaeum, Blaes was permitted to teach botany in the hospital’s herb garden. He would also have liked to give anatomical demonstrations at the surgeons’ guild, but that privilege was jealously guarded by the guild officers and the praelector. Ruysch was granted the privilege of examining deceased hospital patients, and Jan Swammerdam, too, made use of the hospital’s dissecting room in the anatomy annex. As long as Matthew Slade was in charge, they could use the hospital’s facilities freely, but when Slade quit his position, the hospital’s support could no longer be relied upon, and from then on Ruysch and Swammerdam were required to have official authorization from the burgomasters. Nevertheless, Ruysch was well established. In the spring of 1670, he again gave a series of public anatomy lessons, this time on the body of Pasquier Jorisz van Iperen, who had been hanged the previous day. Ruysch gave five demonstrations, from 30 March through 3 April.

28 He thought one should distinguish between two kinds of reason: the ordinary kind, on which medical and legal and even theological knowledge was based, and the philosophical kind, which could lead to perfect knowledge. See Schuurman, Ex naturae lumine.

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The first, on Sunday, attracted a large audience, and yielded record proceeds of 255 guilders. Advantage was taken of this opportunity to immortalize Ruysch as praelector. The initiative was taken by the officers of the guild, who wished to appear in the customary group portrait. This had traditionally taken the form of an anatomy lesson, in which the officers were portrayed as spectators at the dissection of a corpse, presided over by the praelector. The guildhall was decorated with a number of such portraits, the oldest dating from 1603. The most recent were the anatomy lessons given by Ruysch’s immediate predecessors, Tulp and Deijman, both painted by Rembrandt, in 1632 and 1656, respectively. Rembrandt’s Anatomy Lesson of Dr Tulp was not merely an assemblage of individual likenesses, as previous group portraits had been, but rather a picture of observers gazing intently at the corpse, which until this time had been little more than a pretext for the painting, but now occupied centre stage. In the second commission, Rembrandt painted the corpse from a daring angle, seen from the feet, on a large canvas three metres wide and two and a half metres high. Both canvases attracted a great deal of attention, and many travellers made a special trip to the guildhall to see them. This time the commission was given to Adriaan Backer, a nephew of the well-known painter Jacob Backer, who had participated as a young man in the decoration of the new Town Hall in Dam Square, which had been completed in 1655. Above the entrance to the magistrates’ court was a depiction of the Last Judgement, featuring ‘artfully drawn nudes’, on which Backer had collaborated. Afterwards he had spent a long time in Italy, and upon returning to Holland had settled in Amsterdam. He had married the previous year, and was now thirty-five years old. His skill in rendering nudes spoke in his favour, of course, and he was known as a capable portraitist. Backer portrayed Ruysch in the act of showing the inguinal canal in the corpse’s left thigh, surrounded by six surgeons who paid for the honour of being in the picture. Ruysch’s hat is the only sign of their difference in standing. All references to his public anatomy lesson of that year are lacking; it had served only as the pretext for the painting. In the background Backer placed two statues, one of which portrayed Asclepius, the Greco-Roman god of medicine and the patron of surgeons, and the other Galen, or perhaps Apollo, god of art and science. His painting found such favour that he received commissions for a number of other group portraits, such as the members of the Collegium Medicum and the regentesses of the orphanage.

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Fig. 6 The Anatomy Lesson of Frederik Ruysch by Adriaan Backer, 1670. The gentlemen depicted are (from left to right) Leendert Fruijt, Aert van Swieten, Frederik Ruysch, Gillis Hondecoeter, Reinier de Coen, Joris van Loon and Jacob Brandt (Amsterdam Historical Museum).

For the composition of his anatomy lesson of Frederik Ruysch, Adriaan Backer doubtless drew inspiration from the work of Rembrandt, though Backer’s corpse looks far less dead and bloody than Rembrandt’s. The body is decidedly not that of an executed criminal: it is nearly intact, and looks more like a sleeping person than a cadaver. Backer thus demonstrated his ability to portray nudes, at the same time alluding to the embalming technique for which Ruysch was becoming increasingly famous.29 In the summer of 1670, Henry Oldenburg, secretary of the Royal Society in London, received a letter from the Danish scholar Laurids Foss. Foss was in Padua to obtain his doctorate in medicine, but he had previously studied in Leiden, and had also visited Amsterdam during his stay in Holland. He reported that Ruysch had developed a special method of preserving bodies, which, though laborious and time-consuming, enabled corpses to retain their natural shape and 29 Houbraken, Groote Schouburgh II, 186. See Hansen, Resurrecting Death, and Middelkoop, Nieuwe kansen.

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beauty. Ruysch had assured him that bodies thus preserved would not decay. Foss had seen an elbow with the muscles exposed, prepared in such a way as to show their precise structure. Ruysch was in the process of embalming an entire body, and Foss’s learned acquaintances were eagerly awaiting the results.30 There was now so much interest in his work that Ruysch decided to put his collection on public display and charge an entrance fee. When Jan Swammerdam wrote to Thévenot, he told him the news: ‘Ruysch has set up an anatomy room, which he shows to visitors for money.’31 Ruysch was not the only one in Amsterdam with an anatomical collection. In Dirk Kerckrink’s house on the Keizersgracht, the largest room was ‘decorated neither with tapestries nor paintings’, but with skulls and skeletons. In the words of a Dutch poet, ‘pale death had taken up residence there’.32 Ruysch’s collection, however, contained much more than bones. Visitors to his anatomical collection could see, for the first time, internal organs which were not withered and shrunk, but restored to their original shape. For many people this was a dazzling experience, and the collection soon became an attraction. Ruysch housed his ‘cabinet’ in a small annex—next to his home on the Nieuwezijds Achterburgwal—which he rented from the city for fifty guilders a year. The house was not intended as a dwelling, but ‘only to keep skeletons, skulls and other human bones, including embalmed bodies and human body parts’, noted a clerk, who went on to say that these were preparations ‘he has collected from time to time, which he is accustomed to use in demonstrations given for the benefit of young surgeons and other interested parties’.33 Intellectuals in Power In the summer of 1672, the Dutch Republic was in a state of crisis. Since 23 March it had been at war with the English and since 6 April with the French, who were threatening to invade. When Naarden was captured on 20 June, there were fears that Amsterdam would also be taken. The regents led the attempts to defend the city, but they were

30 31 32 33

Foss to Oldenburg, Padua, 18 August 1670 (Corr. Oldenburg VII, 130). Lindeboom, Letters, 62–64. Antonides van der Goes, Gedichten, 125. Scheltema, Leven, 58.

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severely criticized for letting things come to this pass. In Amsterdam the populace remained restless throughout the summer. There were constant protests and the regents were intimidated. On 7 September hundreds of citizens assembled to voice their grievances. Their spokesman was the apothecary Abraham van Poot, who held a doctorate in medicine. The complaints of the citizenry were laid before the new stadholder—Willem III, the young Prince of Orange—who ordered a purge of the city government four days later. From that moment on, the power in Amsterdam was in the hands of Gillis Valckenier, whose supporters included Johan Huydecoper, Johannes Hudde, Nicolaas Witsen and Coenraad van Beuningen. It was from this circle that the burgomasters were subsequently chosen. For people like Frederik Ruysch, which regents were in power was a matter of some importance, since the burgomasters controlled all privileges and appointments. At first Ruysch had been able to profit from the support of Claas Tulp, but after 1672 he no longer had any clout. Gillis Valckenier, the new man in charge, showed little regard for Tulp, scornfully calling him an ‘ignorant toady’. Even so, Ruysch could not complain: the men who now held sway included a number of intellectuals, who were personally involved in scientific developments and willing to support innovation and modernization. Moreover, in some sense they could view Ruysch as one of their own, for several of his forefathers had been burgomasters of Amsterdam. The most important among the new generation of regents was Johannes Hudde, son of an eminent merchant who traded with Italy. Hudde had studied mathematics and philosophy, together with Johan de Witt and Christiaan Huygens, and he was extremely talented, a ‘philosophus et mathematicus incomparabilis’. In 1661 a Danish traveller wrote in his journal that ‘Spinoza surpassed Descartes in philosophy, indeed outstripped him with clear and probable concepts in many matters, but they were all exceeded by the Amsterdammer Hudde’.34 Hudde had also delved into medicine. In 1657 he wrote to a Cartesian supporter, who had sent him a book on human development, to explain that as soon as he had ‘learned the rudiments of medicine’, he intended ‘to use magnifying glasses to discover whether one can see with the eye the generation of many things. In this I have been given great hope by the experiments I have already done, and to this end I

34

Ole Borch’s travel journal. On Hudde, see Vermij, Bijdrage.

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am now trying to determine which magnifying glasses are best suited to my purpose.’35 Hudde had taught Jan Swammerdam how to make single-lens microscopes and advised him on the colouring of injection fluid. In 1667 Hudde became a town councillor, and in 1672 he served his first term as burgomaster. Another burgomaster was Coenraad van Beuningen, who, unlike Hudde, had had a long political career, mainly as a diplomat. A selfdescribed intellectual, Van Beuningen, an adherent of Descartes, had filled his library with the latest publications in the fields of history and natural science.36 Having served as secretary and pensionary of Amsterdam, he had become a member of the town council in 1660, but had continued to live abroad for years. As the Dutch ambassador to France, he resided from 1665 to 1669 in Paris, where he met Jan Swammerdam. Van Beuningen, who would have preferred to devote his life to study, often doubted the value of his political commitment, yet he agreed to serve as burgomaster twice, in 1669 and 1672. Jan Swammerdam profited from his connection with Van Beuningen: after the death of his patron, Van Horne, Swammerdam was indebted to Van Beuningen for obtaining permission for him to carry out dissections at the hospital, ‘to further his research into the constitution of the human body’.37 A third burgomaster from the same circle of regents was Johan Huydecoper, who sought the company of scholars, writers and painters. His main field of interest was plants, which he cultivated in large numbers at his country estate. Willem Piso, next to Tulp the ‘grand old man’ among the physicians, was related to Huydecoper. In 1674, when the body of Piso’s brother-in-law, Willem Bartolotti, was dissected, Huydecoper was among those present and wrote a detailed account of the event.38 Huydecoper was a protégé of Hudde, as was Nicolaas Witsen. Witsen became a town councillor in 1670, after the death of his father, who had served as sheriff and burgomaster. Before this he had devoted most of his time to travel and study. After attending the Latin school in Amsterdam, Witsen had studied philosophy, mathematics and astron-

35

Meinsma, Spinoza, 163. On Van Beuningen, see Roldanus, Van Beuningen. 37 Amsterdam City Archives, hospital archive 1060, 23 January 1670. 38 The Utrecht Archives, Huydecoper archive 57, Huydecoper to Jacobus Servaes, 12 January 1674. See Kooijmans, Vriendschap. 36

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omy at the Athenaeum, and had also become a competent etcher and engraver. He had gone to Leiden to study law at the same time as Ruysch. Witsen’s recently published book on shipbuilding included a chapter by Hudde. Niels Stensen, who read the book in Florence, was highly enthusiastic about its discussion of mechanics. Witsen, too, had sided with the new man in power, Valckenier, who was known to be rather uncouth, but clever enough to surround himself with capable people. Valckenier was said to like Witsen ‘because he took pleasure in his company’ and in his stories about ‘what he had encountered during his travels’.39 Midwifery In 1672 there were several occasions on which Ruysch had great need of political support, beginning with the death of Hendrik van Roonhuijsen, whom Ruysch hoped to succeed as municipal obstetrician. Although this obstetrician’s primary task was to assist women who could not afford medical help but were experiencing complications during childbirth, Ruysch was also considered the pre-eminent specialist in this field, and as such was often consulted by the well-to-do. It was therefore a lucrative position, and to Ruysch it was doubly attractive because it provided access to interesting anatomical material. The municipal obstetrician was called into action only in exceptional circumstances, since childbirth was the province of women. A woman in labour was assisted by a number of women from her family or neighbourhood, as well as by a midwife. A man was called in—a surgeon or perhaps a physician—only when there were complications. Surgeons who specialized in obstetrics could sometimes save a baby: when its head was stuck, for example, they could make use of instruments that midwives were forbidden to use. When surgical intervention was necessary, a surgeon was allowed to operate only under the supervision of a physician. Such operations usually involved extracting a baby that had died before or during delivery. This was not done by Caesarean section, which was performed only in an attempt to save a child after the death of the mother.

39

See Gebhard, Leven.

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The municipal obstetrician was not only a consultant in the case of difficult deliveries, but also the person in charge of teaching midwifery. This position had traditionally been filled by a surgeon, and at first the guild supported the candidacy of thirty-four-year-old Andries Boekelman of Emmerich, who was known as an expert surgeon specialized in obstetrics. Another candidate was Rogier van Roonhuijsen, son of the distinguished surgeon and former municipal obstetrician Hendrik van Roonhuijsen. Rogier, who had been trained by his father, tried to profit from his father’s prestige. Although he was still young and had only just finished his training, his candidacy was supported by the Collegium Medicum, partly because he had announced his intention to attend university. That was an important reason for the authorities to support him, because the municipal obstetrician was also responsible for educating the midwives. But if that was the point, then there was a much more suitable candidate: Frederik Ruysch. His knowledge of anatomy was unparalleled, and he was already responsible for instructing the surgeons in anatomy and administering examinations to the midwives. The only objection was that he had little practical experience of obstetrics, but he declared himself willing to learn.40 The authorities therefore appointed Ruysch, and the guild was forced to accept, for the first time, a physician as municipal obstetrician. Ruysch afterwards explained his appointment by recalling the desire of the authorities to improve the education of midwives. The Collegium Medicum, headed by Willem Piso and François de Vicq (both patricians), had drawn the authorities’ attention to the fact that midwives held all manner of outmoded ideas and that it was high time to update their knowledge. Midwives did not follow a course of training; they gained their knowledge of obstetrics from other women and from experience. Many of them were widows, for whom midwifery was one of the few means of earning a living. The need for midwives to acquire a modicum of anatomical knowledge had been pointed out repeatedly. The popular physician Johan van Beverwijk had recommended this as early as the 1630s, but it was not until the second half of the century that various cities began to require a course of training for midwives and

40 He probably received instruction from an experienced midwife, and entered into an agreement with Rogier van Roonhuijsen regarding the ‘Roonhuijsian secret’: the obstetrical instruments his father had used.

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appointed physicians to give them the necessary instruction. One problem was that most physicians did not have any obstetrical experience themselves, and were often at a loss when practical questions were put to them. They generally turned to handbooks, such as ’t Boeck van de vroetwijfs (The book of midwifery), even though it dated from 1554. Finally, in 1668, a new handbook was published in Paris—François Mauriceau’s Des maladies des femmes grosses et accouchées avec la bonne et veritable methode de les bien aider en leurs accouchemens naturels (Of the maladies of pregnant women and those in childbed, with the good and true method of rightly helping them in giving birth naturally)—which was based on precise anatomical and physiological knowledge. In the same year, the Amsterdam authorities began—at the insistence of the Collegium Medicum—to take steps to raise standards by introducing examinations for midwives. Moreover, the death of Hendrik van Roonhuijsen now made it possible to reorganize their education. After the reshuffle in 1668, there were 137 midwives remaining, and Ruysch was charged with instructing them in anatomy and ‘everything that could possibly happen during childbirth’. First, however, he needed to acquire the necessary experience, and he did this by assisting complicated deliveries, which was extremely unusual for a doctor of medicine. Since becoming the midwives’ official examiner, Ruysch’s knowledge of current obstetric practice had increased, but he had been dismayed by some of his discoveries, and said it was ‘unbelievable how much ignorance and nonsense and how many errors have come to light’. Even women with years of experience had the strangest notions, but Ruysch expected nothing else from midwives who had learned the trade from women as unskilled and ignorant as themselves.41 At an ‘ordinary’ delivery, when the baby came into the world without complications, midwives could pull off a stunning performance. After graciously allowing an apprentice to cut the umbilical cord, they resumed their star role, immediately removing the afterbirth (much importance was attached to this), putting the new mother to bed for a well-earned rest, and proudly displaying the placenta to one and all. After washing the baby and tying off the umbilical cord, the midwife checked the child for defects and wrapped it in swaddling clothes.

41

AW 1031–1032.

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Meanwhile drinks were served—brandy with sugar—and the child was shown to the father and visitors, who slipped the midwife a few coins. Some midwives also predicted on the basis of the number of ‘knots’ in the umbilical cord how many children the couple would have.42 But ordinary deliveries were the exception. More often than not, things went wrong during childbirth, sometimes owing to the midwife’s ineptitude. For example, it was customary for a midwife to stick her ‘finger as deeply as possible into the anus of a woman in labour, to induce the foetus to come out during a difficult delivery’. Ruysch found this regrettable: ‘How many contusions, inflammations, suffocations of the womb, haemorrhoids and mortifications have I seen in those parts!’ Childbirth was accompanied by all kinds of unnecessary and even harmful practices—practices dictated by tradition, superstition, and a shocking lack of elementary knowledge. In general there was far too much intervention at all stages. Midwives meddled with everything, partly to make themselves seem indispensable, but also simply because it was expected of them. In the seventeenth century, a woman in labour had little privacy. She was generally attended by an army of female relatives and neighbours, who came to help or keep an eye on things, and who seldom kept their opinions to themselves. The midwife was often under a great deal of pressure to please them, not only because of the gratuities, but also for the sake of her reputation. If she did not do what was expected of her, her services would not be required at future deliveries. Ruysch often lamented the fate of childbearing women. Frequently the midwife forbade, ‘more cruelly than the executioner’, the woman in labour from drinking anything, saying that otherwise the bladder would swell and keep the baby from passing through the birth canal. The result, according to Ruysch, was that the woman ‘became dryer than a pumice stone, panting, burning, and suffering pain’. He had noticed that after giving birth, the woman was instructed to stand up and clench her fists, to make the uterus return to its proper place. The midwife said, ‘Suck in your body.’ Ruysch thought this a ridiculous and useless practice that ‘could help nothing, because even without such sucking-in, the uterus always returned to its place naturally’. The woman would derive much more benefit from being tucked up into a nice warm bed. There was not a moment to lose in helping ‘a weary,

42

AW 178.

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breathless and weakened patient, who has endured so much’, to get some rest. Why pay any attention to ‘a silly custom’? Ruysch told the midwives that sucking-in was senseless, but they replied that it would be difficult to discontinue, because if they were to skip this step and something were to happen, the family and neighbours would ask if the new mother had sucked in her body, and if she hadn’t, ‘Woe betide the midwife!’43 It often happened that the new mother was told to lie on her left side for a whole week. That custom was based on a misunderstanding that had arisen because so few cadavers were available for research that human anatomy had been deduced from that of animals. Thus it was thought that the uterus was on the left side of the body, and by lying on that side, a woman would hasten the return of the uterus to its natural place. Not only new mothers, but babies, too, suffered unnecessarily. It was usual, for example, to strengthen the baby by giving it blood from the placenta, which had been laid on glowing embers in the fireplace to keep it warm. Sometimes onions were used for the same purpose. Ruysch had seen fresh onions sliced in half and ‘put under the nose of the little mite, to quicken his spirits!’—a practice that even adults would find hard to stomach. In Ruysch’s view there was a ‘filthy, shameful and harmful custom of warming up the newborn’s head, which was therefore covered with ‘a rotten, disgusting, stinking, horrible scratchy crust’. The whole procedure was unnecessary, but if one insisted on keeping the baby’s head warm, it would be better to use a woollen cloth. He opposed the practice of swaddling newborns ‘with the arms and feet pressed together’ so tightly that ‘in no way could they move any of their limbs’. Ruysch advised women to recall the condition of the baby in the womb: ‘Hadn’t prudent nature immersed it in warm water, so that nothing hard could press against it and it could scarcely touch anything? Wasn’t everything in the uterus arranged in such a way that the child floated freely in a lukewarm, motile and soft fluid, being able to move all its limbs and joints as it pleased?’ Moreover, midwives insisted on wrapping up babies in bulky nappies, which only led to hunched backs and bow-legs. Midwives should follow the customs prevailing in Asia, Africa and America, ‘where newborns are wrapped in loose cloths and

43

AW 1121–1122.

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entrusted to the wisdom of nature alone . . . Truly, the bodies of those people grow very well. I never wanted my own children to be treated in an unnatural way’, Ruysch declared. Superstition was rife. There was a general fear, fuelled by midwives, of delivering a ‘sucker’, by which they meant a misshapen lump of flesh, without bones, thought to arise from an ‘imperfect or evil impregnation’: in other words, a deformed creature that sucked the nutrients from the foetus. Ruysch had heard ‘gullible women, who are prone to believe in silly fables’, recount that they had given birth to living—even flying—‘suckers’. Ruysch denied their existence, but met with fierce opposition. The ‘suckers’ brought to him for inspection usually proved to be lumps of clotted blood, in the vague shape of an animal. Sometimes the midwives gave him uterine growths or leftover pieces of afterbirth. Ruysch tried to explain to them what had happened: the womb had shrunk again after birth, causing the placenta to be compressed into a hard, fleshy lump. When a placenta remained in the womb after a miscarriage, it eventually hardened, and when it was finally expelled, it was often thought to be a ‘sucker’. When questioned, the midwives admitted to seeing fleshy growths, but never living ones. Ruysch also did his utmost to dispel the myth that ‘suckers’ were the product of an evil impregnation. That was impossible, he declared, because such growths also occurred in virgins, and he had even seen ‘old women, who do not enjoy the company of men … bring such suckers into the world’. It was true that women sometimes discharged ‘unnatural things’, but he had never seen ‘true suckers, with hair and all, that take on a life of their own’, much less ones that ‘could fly and hide beneath the skirts of women assisting at childbirth’. Ruysch kept a number of ‘suckers’ in his collection, so that he could prove that they were merely hardened pieces of placenta.44 Midwives had a bad name among physicians. In fact, the Hague doctor Cornelis Solingen called them ‘heavy-handed, cheeky, gossipy, tetchy, greedy, drunken and stubborn’. A pamphlet published in Amsterdam urged specialized surgeons to play a more active role in deliveries, because the skills of the average midwife were deplorable. The worst thing about midwives was their tendency to meddle. ‘O wretched, weak and foolish sex’, sighed the author, ‘always touching [the woman in labour] unnecessarily . . . and often administering use-

44

AW 683.

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less enemas.’ Midwives were indeed guilty of many senseless practices, such as urging childbearing women to drink ‘pints of hot wine spiced with rosemary, capfuls of anisette, or offal water’, or expensive ‘pearl waters’ or ‘undiluted cinnamon water’. Nor should midwives themselves indulge in wine, anisette, strong beer or caudle, which invariably made them drunk and sleepy. Clearly, midwives were more foolish than wise—the Dutch term, ‘vroedvrouw’, literally means ‘wise woman’—because when difficulties arose, they waited far too long to call a physician.45 Ruysch regularly criticized midwives, but also pointed out the pressure they were under and thought that they were often blamed unjustly when things went wrong. Incontinence after childbirth, for example, was not the fault of midwives or surgeons, as was often claimed. ‘It is frequently caused by the expansion of the vagina, whereby the head of the bladder, which is firmly attached to the vagina, widens so much that the new mother cannot hold her urine for a number of days or even weeks.’46 Midwives were frequently reproached if the perineum tore during a difficult delivery, but Ruysch pointed out that it was very thin, and that large or big-boned babies sometimes had difficulty passing through a narrow birth canal. The midwives were rightly accused of meddlesomeness, however. Ruysch sternly advised them not to hasten a delivery, telling them to avoid pressing on the abdomen in hopes of pushing the baby towards the cervix, and to refrain from poking their hands into the womb, a practice that only led to infection and inflammation. ‘And what can be said of those rash and foolhardy individuals who are not ashamed to stick their fingers in the anus to make room for the child’s head, since it is so easy to injure the rectum and the surrounding parts!’ Midwives, he said, should remove the afterbirth carefully, preferably allowing nature to take its course. When problems arose, midwives often hesitated to enlist the help of an experienced surgeon, but Ruysch told them not to see it as a failing if they could not deliver the baby successfully. He assured them that sending for a surgeon in time would not damage their reputation; on the contrary, it would give their clients more confidence in them.

45 46

Remedie voor den desolaten boedel, 24–27. AW 67.

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Opposition Ruysch carried out useful missionary work, but by assuming the position of municipal obstetrician, he had taken a certain risk, for not everyone was convinced that a doctor of medicine should have an obstetrical practice. Many physicians thought it disgraceful, and pointed out scornfully that Ruysch had learned obstetrics from a midwife. There were also many surgeons who objected: Rogier van Roonhuijsen, to begin with, who may well have been the victim of circumstances, namely his father’s laxity and premature demise. Rogier was a young man in his twenties, and if his father had lived a few years longer, Rogier would have had the time to gain more experience and would probably have been allowed to succeed him. Other surgeons, too, were bitter about the appointment of a physician as municipal obstetrician. The officers of the surgeons’ guild, in particular, fiercely resisted the reforms imposed by the authorities, and because Ruysch had been the one to implement them, his relations with the guild officers were tense, to say the least. Shortly before Ruysch’s appointment as municipal obstetrician, that tension had come to a head, erupting in a conflict over an examination. On 1 September of the previous year, a pupil of Ruysch, Abram Swartepaart, had been judged incompetent by the officers presiding over his examination. According to an impartial observer, Swartepaart was at least as competent as those examining him, and when Ruysch heard that his pupil had been denied his diploma, he drew up a certificate of competence on his own authority, in which he quoted Ovid to make it clear that the rejection had been based on hatred and envy.47 It caused quite a stir when Swartepaart’s relatives used Ruysch’s certificate to seek redress from the magistrates, who, Ovid notwithstanding, were not amused. In fact, one of the burgomasters severely rebuked Ruysch for his high-handedness. The next clash occurred over the position of forensic physician, who was required to examine victims of violence and report his findings to the magistrates. When the office fell vacant in 1672, Ruysch was an obvious choice, because he was frequently asked to determine the cause of death in such cases anyway. But the man who had promised him the job had been removed from the city government during the

47

‘Pascitur in vivis livor’, Ovid, Amores I, XV, 39. See Luijelack.

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September purge, before the appointment had been confirmed. Ruysch was already acting as forensic physician when a disagreement arose between the burgomasters and the magistrates as to who was qualified to make the appointment. To complicate matters, the municipal surgeons (who were responsible for serving the needs of the poor) considered forensic medicine their province, but Ruysch rejected their claims to the position. In the autumn of 1672, another strategic position in the medical sector fell vacant, when one of the hospital physicians died. His successor had to be formally appointed by the regents of the hospital, but in practice that appointment was made in consultation with the burgomasters. The regents, themselves chosen by the burgomasters, were usually prosperous citizens, for whom it was a mark of distinction to hold public office. Among them was sometimes a patrician’s son, who viewed the position as a stepping stone to a career in government. The regents also had to reckon with a supervisory board of regentesses, most of whom were wives of local officials. On 4 November the burgomaster Cornelis de Vlaming van Oudshoorn officially requested Ruysch’s appointment. In a letter to the regents of the hospital, he noted that Mr Ruysch was a competent individual, and added that since this was no doubt clear to them, he merely requested that they follow his recommendation. After deliberation, however, the regents refused to honour his request, duly recording on 29 December that ‘the burgomasters of this city hereby announce the appointment of Bonaventura Dortmond as second doctor of the hospital’.48 Dr Bonaventura van Dortmond, whose father had been personal physician to the Duke of Holstein, was nearly forty and well-connected in patrician circles. After obtaining his doctorate in Utrecht, he had moved to Amsterdam and taken up residence in a canal-side house on the Herengracht. As a physician he had not made much of a name for himself (he was described as ‘a big lantern without light’), but he had married into the upper class. He prided himself on his birth and status; indeed, his good connections had apparently clinched his appointment. If Ruysch had become a hospital physician (like Deijman, the previous praelector), the bodies of patients who died there would have been

48

Amsterdam City Archives, hospital archive 1017.

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put at his disposal. Now, however, he had to rely on the good graces of the new hospital physician, who, as it turned out, was far from obliging. Both Van Dortmond and the hospital regents crossed Ruysch whenever they could. The regents were not interested in research or education, only in money. At their meetings they discussed financial affairs and dealt with routine matters, making sure, for example, that someone was called in to get rid of ‘the stench from the close-stool’, and resolving to do something about the noise made by the children in church. In the spring of 1672, while French soldiers were invading the country, they discussed the advantages of holding the annual banquet on Easter Sunday instead of Easter Monday. However, when the regents heard that the anatomy annex was in need of repair, they decided not to allocate any resources.49 In August 1674, Frederik Ruysch wrote to the burgomasters to inform them that he had encountered such a distressing lack of knowledge among the midwives that he thought it essential to show them the relevant parts of the body in a cadaver. He therefore requested permission ‘to fetch, every three months, in the stillness of the evening, a suitable corpse from the hospital . . . and to bring it back after completing the demonstration’. The dissection would be witnessed only by the midwives and their apprentices. The petition was passed on to the inspectors of the Collegium Medicum, who consulted the regents of the hospital. The regents objected to the proposal, because if patients knew they ran the risk of being dissected after death, they would avoid the hospital. This was a specious argument, because the dissection of deceased patients had been going on for a long time. Nor was there a dearth of patients. The Collegium Medicum therefore considered the regents’ objection a lame excuse, and advised the burgomasters to honour Ruysch’s request and provide him with cadavers for both the midwives and the apprentice-surgeons. Accordingly, the burgomasters (under the leadership of Johannes Hudde) ordered the hospital to give Frederik Ruysch four female corpses a year for the purpose of instructing the midwives, as well as one male corpse to aid him in teaching young surgeons. After the demonstrations, the cadavers were to be returned to the hospital and given a decent burial. Ruysch was

49

Amsterdam City Archives, hospital archive 1017.

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expected, moreover, to ask the burgomasters’ permission for each dissection.50 Ruysch thus had the right to cadavers from the hospital, but there were strings attached. According to one insider, ‘certain tricks were used to withhold them from Mr Ruysch’.51 The new hospital physician, Bonaventura van Dortmond, obviously favoured the young surgeon Govert Bidloo, to whom he gave not only heads, arms, legs and internal organs, but even whole bodies, whose skeletons Bidloo assembled and sold. Govert Bidloo, a scrawny little man with a striking nose, was a memorable figure in Amsterdam’s medical world. He was ambitious and so utterly convinced of his own skill that he rubbed people the wrong way, not least Frederik Ruysch, who had in fact taught Bidloo the art of preparation. Bidloo had his own anatomical collection, the wonders of which were extolled in a fine poem: ‘Art of dissection! You have been raised to lofty heights by this great hero!’52 The poet praised Bidloo’s preparations, particularly those of the female genitalia: . . . the lungs and liver, finely made, are granted immortality, Here animatedly displayed, as though still in their infancy. The fruitful acre of the seed, which brought forth all humanity, Smiles at you now, for draughts and cold can cause it no more injury The flower of virginity is thus saved from impurity.

Another observer described Bidloo’s house in less exalted terms, as ‘an anatomy cabinet of purchased and purloined bodies’, and pointed out that Bidloo was the good friend of a gravedigger who had been publicly punished for grave-robbing. Govert Bidloo, the son of a hat-maker, had grown up in the tension-fraught Mennonite community. His elder brother, Lambert, a prominent apothecary, had led a fight that culminated in a rift. His supporters had not hesitated to use their fists, ‘sparing neither nose, nor mouth, nor cheek’. Lambert Bidloo sided with the conservative movement (the Fine Mennonites), who considered themselves the true 50 The burgomasters’ resolution was passed on 23 July 1675. In March 1676, in the presence of the midwives, Ruysch cut open the corpse of a woman who had died after giving birth. See hospital archive 1060. 51 Luijelack, 17. 52 Op de anatomische wonderheden van Govard Bidlo (‘On the anatomical wonders of Govert Bidloo’). The author of this poem, the apothecary and doctor of medicine Jan Antonisz, was renowned as a poet under the name of Johannes Antonides van der Goes.

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community of Christ. Tolerance was not their strong suit, and their opponents were vexed by their arrogance. One of them said scornfully that Bidloo’s apothecary shop did not sell a single jar of preserves or syrup that was not covered with ‘the scum of pretension’, nor any box or tin that did not contain ‘a pinch of condescension’. One only had to buy a small amount of ‘sleeping powder’ to ‘notice instantly from his grand gestures no small display of conceit’. He pretended to be not only a ‘doctor, apothecary, surgeon, historian and quacksalver, but also—believe it or not!—barrister and solicitor’, according to one of his adversaries, who described him as a ‘conceited fool’.53 Conceited he may have been, but Lambert Bidloo was a versatile man. In addition to his religious writings, he published a botanical study and wrote poetry. It was a hard act to follow, but his younger brother Govert refused to be outdone by him. Having become apprenticed to a surgeon, Govert Bidloo had followed Ruysch’s lessons and had even translated his book on the valves in the lymph vessels from Latin into Dutch. According to Ruysch, however, since childhood Govert had been a ‘silly braggart’ who believed himself ‘clever enough to explain all mysteries’. He claimed to be more skilled than anyone at performing experiments with air-pumps, mercury or microscopes, and everything he thought up he declared to be ‘mathematically certain’.54 Like his brother, Govert Bidloo had literary ambitions. On his nineteenth birthday he wrote a poem, in which he urged himself to repent. ‘Just think’, he asked himself rhetorically, ‘whether you have ever spent a moment of your precious time doing your duty and whether you have stopped trying to cloak your diligence in vanities’. His poetry was mostly intended for special occasions: odes, funeral dirges, wedding songs and suchlike. He also wrote plays, and claimed to have learned the art from none other than the famous playwright Vondel. In one of his verses, he told his readers: Father Vondel always told me ‘nothing ventured, nothing gained’, Until he lay, still teaching, in my arms, of all life drained.55

53

Bruijerij, 25. AW 455, 464. Bidloo dedicated his translation of Ruysch’s work to his teachers Jan Coenerding and Barend van Ulsen. 55 Bidloo, Mengelpoëzy, 82, 148. 54

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Govert Bidloo had been subjected to the same kind of criticism as his brother. ‘This driveller refuses to follow the Mennonite teaching that one shall be humble and tolerant’, wrote a critical observer, who declared that ‘this big fool of fancied wisdom considers himself superior and dares to chastise others’.56 Govert was described as a windbag, who stubbornly persisted in defending his own standpoint, even when it was completely untenable. Govert Bidloo began in his early twenties to lecture privately on philosophy and anatomy, and the new hospital physician, Van Dortmond, contributed to these lectures. The reactions were mixed. The prominent physician Egbert Veen, who had succeeded Willem Piso as a member of the Collegium Medicum, praised the lectures, but there was also criticism of Bidloo’s courses: ‘In anatomy he has arrived at the point where his disciples demand their money back, saying that he did not show them what he promised.’57 Van Dortmond thought much of his protégé. He recommended Bidloo highly, saying that he could perform painless blood-lettings. But there were also many who sneered at the ‘grey-haired doctor associating with such a young, scrawny Vesalius, who is still wet behind the ears’. Gluttonous Tipplers Ruysch faced constant opposition from both the hospital and the surgeons’ guild, which was notoriously corrupt. The officers of the guild were recruited from a small circle of surgeons who alternated as board members. Even though the town council had recently taken measures to limit the favouritism that prevailed in the guilds, this had made little difference to the way the surgeons’ guild operated. The officers, who were allowed to do as they pleased, brazenly abused their freedom by securing financial privileges for themselves and lavishing money on food and drink. This was done at the expense of those who needed the money most: destitute guild-brothers, widows who did not receive the benefits and pensions to which they were entitled, and young surgeons hoping to obtain diplomas, who were forced to slip the officers large sums of money, as well as gifts in natura, to be 56 57

Desolaten Boedel, 30. Bruijerij, 11–13.

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allowed to sit the examination. These corrupt practices had become known as a result of backbiting and jealousy, with officers boasting about who had raked in the most money or acquired more table napkins, silk clothes and linen. Such corruption had long been a source of irritation, but in 1675 fifteen guild-brothers finally lodged a complaint against their own board of governors. They addressed their grievances to the burgomasters, who put the case to the Collegium Medicum, who in turn recommended that immediate action be taken.58 The corruption case brought to light the great inequality among the guild members. To begin with, not all the apprentice-surgeons passed their master-proof. Many continued to be assistants, working only as barbers, or obtained a diploma as a ship’s surgeon. Among those who did become master-surgeons with their own shops, there were huge differences in skill and status. Most surgeons concentrated on ordinary treatments, and derived part of their income from shaving and haircutting. Some specialized in ‘major surgery’ and performed complicated operations, but such surgeons were invariably barred from the board, which was dominated by ‘ordinary’ surgeons whose policymaking was designed to safeguard their income. Some surgeons were vexed by this, and were embarrassed that their guild ‘was ruled by such stupid, ignorant and foolish buffaloes’.59 Ruysch had close ties to the opposition to the ruling clique. He had been appointed lecturer in anatomy, but was expected to couple anatomy and surgery in his lessons, just as he coupled anatomy and obstetrics in the lessons he gave to the midwives. Because he had not been trained as a surgeon and had never worked in that capacity, it was important for him to maintain good relations with surgeons who could teach him the finer points of surgical practice. He therefore collaborated with three famous surgeons: Andries Boekelman, Allard Cyprianus and Pieter Adriaansz, all of whom were at war with the guild’s governing board. The last two, in particular, had a bone to pick with the officers. Pieter Adriaansz was nearly forty. He was the most famous surgeon in Amsterdam, and his shop on the Herengracht was sought out by 58

The Amsterdam guild had such a bad name that a surgeon who had passed the examination in Amsterdam was not allowed to practice in Zierikzee. His request for permission to open up a shop there was turned down (Boesman, Examens, 51–52). 59 Schoppen is troef, 27.

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people from outside the city. In the presence of Frederik Ruysch and his colleague Allard Cyprianus, Pieter Adriaansz amputated the right arm of a Dordrecht brewer, who had been diagnosed with an aneurism. A woman from Haarlem with breast cancer also came to him, and after examining her, he initially told her ‘the good news, and some of the bad news’, as cautious surgeons were wont to do. Still, it soon became clear that a mastectomy was necessary. Pieter Adriaansz performed the operation in the presence of Allard Cyprianus, and even though he did it skilfully, the woman died six months later.60 In February 1675 Pieter Adriaansz consulted Ruysch before preparing to perform a mastectomy on a twenty-year-old maidservant, who had an egg-size lump in her left breast. After everything had been made ready for the operation, however, he discovered ‘some softness’ in the middle of the lump, which made him suspect that it contained fluid. He therefore proposed opening up the breast with a lancet. Ruysch approved the idea, and the next day the surgeon made an incision, ‘from which instantly flowed a large amount of very clear and thin fluid, which resembled water’. The mastectomy therefore proved unnecessary.61 Most surgeons baulked at performing radical or dangerous operations, regarding them as potentially damaging to their reputation. Not so Pieter Adriaansz, who was known as a fearless surgeon, constantly in search of better techniques and willing to take risks. He operated even if there was a good chance the patient would die. So, too, Allard Cyprianus, who dared to ‘cut stones’ out of people, meaning that he knew how to remove bladder stones—a dangerous operation that frequently ended in the patient’s death. Even so, the procedure was performed regularly, because bladder stones were so common and caused such suffering. Each city had a specialized ‘stone-cutter’ in its employ, a surgeon charged with performing the operation on people who could not afford to pay for it. Stone-cutters (lithotomists) were usually paid by the authorities for every operation they performed. Other surgeons were also allowed to cut out bladder stones, with the permission of the burgomasters, but most surgeons would not risk it. A cool head was required to perform a life-threatening operation in the presence of a crowd of spectators. Only the most ambitious surgeons would hazard it. For those who could pull

60 61

Schouten, Tegennatuurlijke gezwellen, 649. Verduijn, XXII Heelkundige waarnemingen, 1009–1010.

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it off, such operations were lucrative, but an unsuccessful operation could ruin one’s reputation. Psychological damage was also a possibility: there were stone-cutters who had sunk into depression after an unsuccessful operation. All those involved were aware of the risks. Even when the operation was performed correctly, there were countless contingencies beyond the surgeon’s control. The stone might prove too large to dislodge; the kidneys, bladder or urinary ducts could be inflamed; the patient could be too weak to survive the operation, because it had been delayed too long; finally, the wound could become infected. Not only was stonecutting a risky business, but Allard Cyprianus had ventured to experiment with a new method. This proved fatal to his reputation: after a number of unsuccessful operations, he was accused of recklessness. His problems were compounded by complaints from the guild, and the authorities finally revoked his licence and issued an ordinance forbidding surgeons to perform the operation without prior permission from the burgomasters. One of their apprentices afterward testified to the slander that Allard Cyprianus and Pieter Adriaansz had been forced to endure because of their experimental techniques.62 A certain amount of jealousy was also involved, for the ‘major surgeons’ were men of standing, who earned a great deal of money. There were no fixed rates for the various treatments, so a price was agreed upon in each case, and a surgeon capable of performing complicated operations could demand higher fees than the average surgeon. To gain some insight into the guild’s corrupt practices, in September 1675 the burgomasters appointed an officer who was not on the guild’s list of candidates: Andries Boekelman, a surgeon specialized in obstetrics, a Mennonite and the same age as Ruysch. Boekelman was charged with drawing up a list of abuses and reporting his findings to the burgomasters. His report revealed that the officers demanded too much money from examination candidates, that needy guild members seldom received the benefits they were entitled to, and that the entire financial administration was corrupt. Accordingly, Boekelman and several of his supporters presented the burgomasters with some proposals for reform. The civic ordinance passed in October 1676 set the maximum fee for a master-proof at 120 guilders.63 It forbade the

62 63

Dirk Cloes, in Titsingh, Steen, 94–95. Amsterdam City Archives, surgeons’ guild archive 228, 31 October 1676.

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board from spending more than 300 guilders on its annual banquet, in order to safeguard the funds earmarked for needy guild-brothers and their widows, who were often too humiliated to ask the guild for money. Thus the ordinance reaffirmed a resolution passed nearly a century earlier, in 1578, which declared that such people had a right to financial assistance if their poverty was due to illness or old age, although relief would not be given to those whose destitution was the result of ‘a dishonest life, such as whoring, drunkenness, gambling and so on’. Furthermore, examinations would be made more rigorous, but also more fair. In future, both the officers of the guild and the praelector were to be present at every examination. Frederik Ruysch was therefore deployed as a watchdog, to prevent candidates from bribing the examiners. To prepare the apprentices and assistant-surgeons for their masterproof, Ruysch was to instruct them every Thursday from 2 to 3 p.m. in the guildhall, which was furnished with a cupboard for the books, instruments and medicines needed for these lessons. Moreover, Andries Boekelman was appointed municipal obstetrician alongside Ruysch, and was subsequently allowed to assist him at deliveries. The immediate cause of Boekelman’s appointment was presumably a dramatic incident that had taken place the year before. Mattheus Hooghuijs, a paper merchant on the Oudezijds Voorburgwal, recounted that in November 1675, Ruysch had been called in to assist his wife, who had been in labour for ten hours. Ruysch examined the woman and discussed her condition with the midwife before going home to fetch his instruments. He returned that evening and conducted a short internal examination, after which he sniffed his finger and concluded from the smell that the child was dead. He was even more convinced of this after noticing that the woman’s belly was ‘caved in’, and said that if the child were not removed, the mother would soon die. The husband was shaken, and said, ‘If it cannot be otherwise, then save my wife.’ Ruysch unpacked his instruments, blew out the candle, and set to work in the dark. He pulled the baby out, laid it in a tub, covered it with some dirty cloths, and put the tub under a chair. While his wife was being led away to bed, Hooghuijs went to have a look at the child. ‘Removing the cloths and examining the child all over’, he noticed that ‘the skull had been pinched off and damaged’, so that he ‘could see the brain lying there’. But he also saw the baby ‘yawn with its little mouth’. Realizing that it was still alive, he cried out, ‘Oh my God, the child has been murdered.’ The baby did not go on breathing for long;

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the midwife eventually swaddled it and laid it in a box. Ruysch had presumably misjudged the situation. Hooghuijs reported that Ruysch left immediately after the operation and had never charged the couple for his services.64 Such painful mistakes could not always be avoided. Perhaps Ruysch was afraid his reputation might suffer if he continued to assist at deliveries, and thus sought the help of an experienced surgeon. One of his adversaries accused Ruysch of exerting undue influence on his wellconnected friends to persuade the burgomasters to split the office of municipal obstetrician in two. In the event, he chose to work with the master-surgeon Andries Boekelman, who was ‘doubtless enticed by the hope of profit to act as his handyman’. The appointment of Andries Boekelman, who was in fact a recognized specialist, stirred up ill will, first of all that of his competitor Rogier van Roonhuijsen (still not in the possession of his doctorate), who had been passed over yet again and so began secretly to slander Ruysch and Boekelman. In addition, there were two other people who had coveted the post of municipal obstetrician: the hospital doctor Van Dortmond and his protégé Govert Bidloo. Neither of them had any obstetrical experience, but Bidloo, who considered himself a top-notch surgeon, did not doubt his ability to perform obstetrical procedures. Van Dortmond and Bidloo thought that Ruysch and Boekelman had been appointed to the office mainly because they had access to the instruments needed to deal with complicated deliveries. This was an important consideration, because without such instruments, a child whose head had become stuck in the birth canal had no chance of survival. There was no choice but to cut open the baby’s skull, in order to save the mother. Sometimes the surgeon waited until the child was dead and the skull became softer, so that it could be manipulated more easily. The doctor then used his hand or hooks to pull out the baby. Ruysch and Boekelman, however, frequently managed to extricate babies without mishap, which is why they were often called in when complications arose. Surgical instruments were a source of income, so their precise nature was a well-kept secret, which explains why Ruysch had assisted Mattheus Hooghuijs’s wife in the dark. Such secrecy led to rumours that obstetricians had a special instrument that enabled them to

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Declaration made before the notary Gerrit Steeman, 26 March 1677.

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‘screw open’ a woman’s vagina. Naturally Van Dortmond and Bidloo—annoyed at not knowing the secret—did their best to fuel such rumours. Van Dortmond thought himself a much more distinguished physician than Ruysch, and he had looked on with envy and growing resentment at the rising star of the erstwhile apothecary. Van Dortmond and Bidloo shared their rancour against Ruysch and Boekelman with the ruling clique in the surgeons’ guild, which was led by Jan Coenerding. Coenerding had been the protégé of Ruysch’s predecessor, Deijman (himself no highflyer), who had seen to it that this ordinary surgeon—rather than the ‘scholar’ Job van Meekeren— had risen to power. While Van Meekeren had shown great interest in advances in anatomical knowledge and surgical techniques, Coenerding was bent on protecting his business interests. He thought that Boekelman, like Esau, had sold the guild’s birthright to a stranger—a reference to the privilege granted to Ruysch to be present at all examinations. Coenerding called Boekelman a scoundrel and a traitor, because he had supposedly persuaded the authorities that examinations not supervised by the praelector were of no value whatsoever. Coenerding’s principal target was Boekelman, but he also bore a grudge against Ruysch and Egbert Veen, the one who had insisted, at the behest of the Collegium Medicum, that the authorities take measures to quell the corruption in the guild. Like Ruysch, Veen had studied in Leiden with Jan van Horne, though a number of years earlier, because he was ten years older. Now nearly fifty, he belonged to the scholarly elite within the Remonstrant community. Veen, a renowned physician, served as doctor of the admiralty and was a member of the Collegium Medicum. By all accounts he was valued by his fellow citizens for his ‘admirable qualities’ as well as his medical skills.65 He was popular because of his inexpensive house calls, but according to Jan Coenerding, his kindness was a sham. ‘Although he rides on horseback like kind St Nicholas,’ said the dean of the surgeons’ guild, he was ‘a stingy, grasping fellow’.66 Coenerding belonged to the same church as Veen, though he was no longer a churchgoer. Now in his late forties, Coenerding had become a vindictive man whose favourite phrase, according to Matthew Slade, was, ‘I couldn’t live without women and Rhenish wine.’ The avaricious

65 66

Medicus politicus, 68. Koeckoecxzangh, 20.

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Coenerding was equally fond of food. A fellow surgeon even advised him to ‘move to Germany, where they gorge themselves and drink like fish’.67 Coenerding particularly resented the fact that Veen had passed on to the burgomasters the Collegium Medicum’s advice to tackle the corruption within the guild without first listening to what the officers had to say. Veen had advised the town councillors ‘to demand receipts for everything promptly’, and had apparently portrayed the officers as ‘gluttonous tipplers’.68

67 68

Luijelack, 25–27, 39, 54. Den aftocht, 12–13.

CHAPTER THREE

UNDER FIRE Bungling Boekelman, ignoramus, Tears to bits both bladder and anus!1

The services of Ruysch and Boekelman were much in demand in late 1676. Around Christmas they were called upon to help a woman in Haarlem, whose brother-in-law had been sent to fetch them because her life was in danger: she could not be delivered of a child that had been dead in the womb for twenty-four hours. Later that day Ruysch and Boekelman delivered the child within fifteen minutes. Such success confirmed their reputation, but it also fuelled the rancour of those who begrudged them their secret. Accusations On the night of Monday, 1 February 1677, a midwife was called to attend the twenty-eight-year-old widow Lysbeth Jans van Ravenswaay, who lived in a room in a house in Markensteeg. She was about to give birth to her first child, but the midwife had seen that Lysbeth Jans had ‘a body unsuitable to giving birth’. Late in the morning the midwife went home to get some sleep, leaving Lysbeth in the care of her substitute, who stayed until 11 a.m. the next day. By then there was cause for alarm, since the second midwife had noticed that Lysbeth ‘had a very foul smell about her’ and that ‘a green substance was accumulating on the sheets’. Both midwives declared that in all their working years they had never experienced such a stench coming from a woman in labour. They also noticed that her genitals were very swollen. On Thursday the two women decided to send for the municipal obstetrician. When Ruysch arrived at 1 p.m., the first midwife gave an account of the situation and showed him the patient. Ruysch saw that the woman was extremely weak and had a serious inflammation. Fearing the worst, he went to fetch Andries Boekelman. After Boekelman had examined 1

De krukkedans van de bepiste mennist (poem).

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the woman, Ruysch had another look at her. They detected ‘a dreadful inflammation and the beginning of mortification of the parts of the body the child had to pass through’, which had become ‘so thick, hard and narrow’ as to make a normal birth completely impossible. Obviously the baby was no longer alive, and putrefaction was so far advanced that even the woman’s breath was foul. Boekelman said that the child ‘was rotting and stinking so much that it almost forced us to flee the room’.2 Ruysch doubted the wisdom of removing the dead foetus surgically. He thought an operation too dangerous, and would have preferred to wait until the swelling had gone down. He could not be certain that would happen, though, and if they did not act quickly, the woman would probably die. Her housemates and the midwives urged them to operate. ‘If she must die,’ they argued, ‘at least deliver her of the child, because she cannot go on like this for long.’ The patient herself begged them to operate. Ruysch, convinced it would not be ‘humanly possible’ to escape death otherwise, gave Boekelman permission to remove the dead baby. Boekelman realized that he risked being blamed if the woman did not survive, but he prepared to operate all the same, placing the patient in a suitable chair and posting a midwife on either side. Lysbeth’s landlady could not bear to watch the operation, but she heard Lysbeth exclaim, ‘Woe is me! It hurts so much’, to which Ruysch replied, ‘Not to worry, we’re just pulling the child out!’ It was over quickly. Ruysch declared that the operation ‘went so quickly and easily that one could scarcely count to a hundred’, and described the baby as ‘monstrously big’. And though it was uninjured, it had a ‘small opening on the top of its head’. Lysbeth was in reasonably good shape, given the circumstances. She even stood up and walked back to bed herself, albeit shakily. Seeing her safely in bed, Ruysch and Boekelman left her in the midwife’s care. Despite the apparent success of the operation, Lysbeth’s condition worsened, and because she was too poor to pay a doctor, she was admitted to hospital on Monday, 8 February. No one informed Ruysch or Boekelman, however. Van Dortmond, the hospital physician, had already done his rounds that day, so Lysbeth was received by the second-in-charge.

2

Nader vertoog, 34.

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Since it was the duty of the doctors in attendance to visit a patient after an operation, Ruysch and Boekelman went that Monday to Lysbeth’s house, where they were told that she had been taken to hospital. Ruysch went there and inquired after Lysbeth, but those in charge seemed to know nothing of her case. He asked to be told at once in the event of her admission to hospital. When Van Dortmond made his rounds of the hospital patients on Tuesday at 9 a.m., he found Lysbeth among the new mothers, moaning ‘very pitifully about unbearable pain in the nether regions’.3 Upon his orders she was transferred to the women’s ward of the ‘bandaging house’ (the surgical department, on the top floor of the hospital). He understood that she had been treated by Ruysch, but made no effort to contact him. The following morning a hospital servant informed Ruysch that there was a corpse suitable for dissection. He gave the servant a shilling, and he and Boekelman, who was with him at the time, went to the hospital, where they arrived around noon. Ruysch saw that the body Van Dortmond had allocated to him was not at all suitable, and he heard from the matron of the women’s ward that there were problems with Lysbeth Jans, who had been examined that morning. Ruysch and Boekelman were impatient to know what was wrong, and asked to be taken to her. Their request was denied, however, and Daniel Florianus, one of the hospital surgeons, said that they could not examine her until the following day, because Van Dortmond insisted on being present. Ruysch and Boekelman, disgruntled, were told to return the next morning at 8 a.m. Van Dortmond had examined Lysbeth and found that she had a ruptured perineum. He spread the word that Boekelman had bungled the operation by using a sharp instrument to deliver the baby. That evening Van Dortmond sent word to his friend Govert Bidloo to come to the hospital the following morning, ‘because there was something new to see’. That same day Ruysch heard from the hospital that another woman, whose body would in fact be suitable for dissection, was on her deathbed. The woman died that night, and Ruysch and Boekelman were informed of her death when they went to the hospital the next morning. It was agreed that the corpse would be taken on Friday evening to

3

Aennemingh, 12.

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the anatomical theatre, where it would be dissected for the midwives on Saturday and used again on Sunday to give the surgeons and their apprentices an anatomy lesson. At the hospital that morning, Ruysch and Boekelman ran into the surgeons Abraham Hondecoeter and Daniel Florianus, both of whom had been involved in the scandal surrounding the officers of the surgeons’ guild and were thus ill-disposed towards them. Prevented once again from seeing Lysbeth, Ruysch grew angry and began to protest, but Florianus said he was acting on orders from Van Dortmond, who would permit them to see Lysbeth only in his presence. A short while later Van Dortmond appeared, and also—as if by accident—the surgeons Govert Bidloo and his former teacher Jan Coenerding, the dean of the guild. Van Dortmond led the whole company to Lysbeth’s bed. Abraham Hondecoeter loosened her bandage and the gentlemen examined her, finding a tear in the perineum and traces of gangrene. According to Van Dortmond, the tear extended from the vulva to the anal sphincter. The rupture was fresh and bloody, and Van Dortmond told them that urine and faeces were escaping through it.4 Abraham Hondecoeter pressed on Lysbeth’s abdomen to show them that excrement was then discharged through the vulva, and told them that she urinated continually when her wound was being dressed. He also showed them that the gangrene in the labia had stopped spreading. He then turned Lysbeth around and showed the gentlemen that her buttocks were covered with abrasions. In fact, her lower body was so badly injured ‘that it had to be bandaged with plasters the size of newspapers’. Having taken stock of the situation, Ruysch and Boekelman were preparing to leave when Van Dortmond reproached them, saying that Boekelman’s surgical methods were to blame for Lysbeth’s condition. Ruysch declared that the perineum often tore during difficult deliveries and that some women did not even notice it. Such ruptures frequently healed by themselves. Van Dortmond refused to believe this, and said he was convinced that the wound had been caused by the improper use of an instrument. This angered Ruysch, who knew that Van Dortmond had no obstetrical experience and was incapable of assessing the situation. Turning to face him, Ruysch said, ‘Sir, you have not often witnessed or taken part in such matters.’ Van Dortmond, offended,

4

Antwoort, 9; Aennemingh, 31.

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insisted that he was no less a physician than Ruysch, to which Ruysch replied that Van Dortmond could not deny that he and Boekelman had given the patient the proper treatment. Van Dortmond was obviously bent on stirring up trouble. Quite by accident, a similar case presented itself at this time. Ruysch and Boekelman were summoned to the bedside of a woman in Noordse Bos who was in labour with her first child. She proved to be suffering from severe conglutination, inflammation and incipient gangrene of the labia. In spite of this, a midwife had delivered the baby alive, but Ruysch and Boekelman had been fetched because there appeared to be a second child on the way. It, too, was born alive, but the woman’s perineum was torn up to the anus. Even though the woman had said that neither the midwife nor the obstetricians were to blame, the case drew a great deal of attention. The authoritative doctor Willem Piso attempted to nip the conflict in the bud by asking Govert Bidloo and several other reputable surgeons to examine the woman. On the evening of the clash between Ruysch and Van Dortmond, Piso held a meeting at his house on the Keizersgracht to which he invited not only Boekelman and Bidloo, but also the surgeons Pieter Adriaansz and Allard Cyprianus. The case was discussed around the fireplace. ‘This is the same thing we saw at the hospital’, Boekelman began, seeking confirmation that ‘this mishap was caused by a difficult delivery’ and not by the use of instruments. Piso, Cyprianus and Pieter Adriaansz urged Bidloo to mediate between Boekelman and Van Dortmond. Bidloo declared his willingness to act as peacemaker and issued a statement the following day: Van Dortmond, he said, had nothing against Boekelman, but was nonetheless convinced that Lysbeth’s wounds had been caused by the improper use of a surgical instrument.5 Several days later Boekelman returned to the hospital to examine Lysbeth in the company of Allard Cyprianus. There had been no improvement in her condition. Daniel Florianus, who dressed her wounds, now showed them an opening between the colon and the vagina. He did this by inserting a surgical spatula into the anus which came out in the vagina. Boekelman was astonished to see Florianus using a method this rough to examine such tender parts of the female anatomy. Not only that, but Florianus repeated the procedure every time he showed Lysbeth’s wounds to interested observers. Boekelman

5

Nader vertoog, 41–42, 71. Een woortje in transitu, 17–21.

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remarked that the size of the tear in Lysbeth’s perineum had increased sixfold during her stay in hospital, and supposed that the perforation in the rectum—a new injury—had been caused by the gangrene, which had not been treated properly. Van Dortmond, who told the matrons and regentesses of the hospital that Ruysch and Boekelman had bungled the treatment of Lysbeth Jans, encouraged various surgeons and midwives to come and see for themselves. Boekelman understood why: it was ‘to give them mistaken ideas about my operations, thus generally frightening off the women, so that they will never again request our services’. Van Dortmond spread the news, telling members of Amsterdam’s town council and even regents in other cities that Ruysch and Boekelman had injured a woman with their surgical instruments. Clearly, Van Dortmond was trying to make everyone believe that Boekelman’s methods had been brutal and inept and that Ruysch had acted irresponsibly. Daniel Florianus was heard to say, ‘Now we have something to use against him’, and Govert Bidloo—who also sniffed an opportunity, since he and Van Dortmond would be able to take over as municipal obstetricians if they succeeded in damaging Ruysch’s and Boekelman’s reputations—apparently said, ‘Now we’re in business’, and gleefully added, ‘There’s good fishing in troubled waters.’ When he realized that Van Dortmond was conniving with Bidloo and the officers of the guild to besmirch his and Ruysch’s good name, Boekelman resolved to defend himself. He published a booklet, in which he refuted the accusation that he had acted improperly and gave an exhaustive account of the matter.6 As usual, he mentioned the names of everyone involved, so that they could corroborate his story. Credibility was considered more important than discretion, despite Hippocrates’ insistence on the latter. Discretion was practised only when the patient enjoyed a certain social standing; obviously Lysbeth Jans did not merit such consideration. Boekelman first pointed out that Lysbeth’s injuries could also have been incurred without the intervention of physicians, surgeons or midwives. He gave several examples, including the case of the woman in Noordse Bos and several others from the literature. A similar case

6

Boekelman, Nootwendig bericht.

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occurred in the published observations of Hendrik van Roonhuijsen; Boekelman also cited the famous French obstetrician François Mauriceau and a host of other authorities.7 In Boekelman’s opinion, Lysbeth’s condition had been caused by gangrene, which was not his fault, he assured his readers, because he had detected it when he first examined her. The fact that the child had been wedged in the birth canal for so long had caused the gangrene, but the failure of the hospital physicians to treat it had led to the development of fistulae. Boekelman emphasized that Van Dortmond had not been present at the operation, knew nothing of the case history, and was completely inexperienced in obstetrics. His utterances had obviously been provoked by ‘fierce jealousy’, and his actions conformed to a pattern, namely the attempts ‘made in recent years to cast suspicion on the operations commendably performed by Mr Ruysch’. Boekelman was suggesting that Van Dortmond was envious of the success he and Ruysch enjoyed as municipal obstetricians. One of the secrets of that success, besides Ruysch’s anatomical knowledge and Boekelman’s surgical skill, was the fact that they had an instrument to aid them in difficult deliveries. That instrument was a well-kept secret (and their desire to keep it secret was never an issue), but this naturally provoked jealousy and wild rumours that were difficult to disprove without revealing the nature of the instrument. Boekelman spoke out plainly, declaring that there could be no doubt that he ‘condemned all instruments likely to cause injury or rupture’ and that he had used ‘no such instrument in this operation’. He appealed to Ruysch, who backed him up, saying that he had performed the operation perfectly. Boekelman was convinced that he had ‘snatched the woman from the jaws of death’, and said he would gladly demonstrate his surgical methods to a group of impartial arbiters if they would promise to keep his secret. Boekelman defended himself so vigorously against all attempts to tarnish his reputation that Van Dortmond felt compelled to reiterate his version of events, lest his own reputation should suffer. Even though his accusations were not based on hard evidence, Van Dortmond had a relatively easy time of it, since all he had to do was sow

7 When recording a similar case, the Amsterdam physician Bellanger remarked: ‘Whether the sphincter was also damaged I cannot say for certain, because I dared not examine everything so carefully, lest the common folk think me overly curious.’

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doubt. Moreover, the fact that Boekelman had sought the public eye allowed him to issue a public response, in which he declared that he had not known if he should react to Boekelman’s pamphlet or answer ‘the author of this nice piece of work’ with scornful silence.8 If Boekelman himself had penned it, he might not have responded, but Ruysch was also involved. Van Dortmond was thus insinuating that Ruysch was the real author of the pamphlet, having deduced as much from the style of writing. Van Dortmond, declining Boekelman’s offer of a surgical demonstration, now attempted to buttress his accusations with a number of incriminating allegations. He asked Lysbeth, who was still in hospital, to sign a statement unfavourable to Ruysch and Boekelman, and had two hospital nurses testify that Lysbeth could not defecate in the usual manner, but only ‘through her female parts’, and that this had been so ‘before any physician or surgeon in the hospital had seen her’. In other words, only Boekelman and Ruysch were to blame. In the meantime, the unwitting source of all this commotion— Lysbeth Jans, whose most intimate anatomical details were being discussed on every street corner in Amsterdam—was told, even though she was not recovering, that she had to leave the hospital because the surgeons could do no more for her. This opened up new vistas for Boekelman, who promised to help Lysbeth by paying her rent and offering free treatment. This prompted her to revoke the sworn statement she had made for Van Dortmond, which she now claimed to have signed under duress and in complete ignorance of its contents, out of fear of being turned out of hospital. ‘Here you see Dr Dortmond’s entire building come crashing down’, said Boekelman, who now asked Lysbeth to swear that he had extracted the child ‘in a gentle and very special way’, and that she had given birth ‘without much screaming or moaning’. She went on to declare that Boekelman had not used any sharp or screw-like instruments and that the baby had been very large—so large that it did not fit into the coffin she had bought, and to avoid buying another, she had put the baby into it with its knees raised and its head bent forward. Lysbeth was still in hospital, but her wounds had not been dressed for three or four days. When Van Dortmond heard about her latest sworn statement, she was

8 Antwoort op het nootwendigh bericht van meester Andries Boeckelman (Reply to the necessary notice from master Andries Boekelman).

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dismissed from hospital, whereupon she returned to her old room in Markensteeg.9 Boekelman, who could now quote Lysbeth’s own words to prove he had not injured her, began to write his rebuttal, in which he argued that the large tear and the damage to the rectum had occurred after her admission to hospital. He pointed out the serious consequences of the treatment Lysbeth had received there, and declared that the insertion of cotton wadding in the opening in the ‘straight intestine’ had caused such injury that she might never regain her health. Because Van Dortmond and Florianus had let her ‘internal parts’ grow together, she might never again be able to menstruate normally. Boekelman wondered whether Van Dortmond was aware ‘that one should use pessaries to keep the parts separate after the gangrenous flesh has fallen off ’. He thought it disgraceful that Lysbeth’s treatment had been deliberately neglected so that Van Dortmond would have a reason to slander Ruysch and himself. Boekelman knew that he was hated for exposing the corruption in the guild and that the officers held it against him for ‘overturning their flesh-pot’. He maintained that since Ruysch’s appointment as municipal obstetrician, Van Dortmond and Bidloo had been trying to convince everyone that they ‘understood the art better than anyone, even though Mr Ruysch had successfully performed the operation about a hundred times and Dr Dortmond had probably witnessed no more than four in his entire life’. In Boekelman’s view, it was obvious that Van Dortmond’s scheme had backfired and that his slander had done little to discredit Ruysch. Meanwhile Ruysch and Boekelman were telling everyone what a thick-headed lout Van Dortmond was. The case of Lysbeth Jans was the natural result of ‘the negligence and carelessness’ of the hospital’s physician and surgeons, who were rightly regarded as hacks. It was high time that their incompetence became public knowledge. Boekelman’s response had almost gone to press when Van Dortmond published two letters. By now it was mid-May and the question had been dragging on for more than three months. The tenor of the letters was not a complete surprise. Van Dortmond had apparently said, ‘I’m sorry, but I must ruin Boekelman. He has insulted me.’ This was an allusion to Boekelman’s statement that Van Dortmond was a man ‘of no learning, skill or experience’. Van Dortmond’s response

9

Nader vertoog, 59.

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was venomous. In a letter written to Ruysch in Latin—which later appeared in a Dutch translation, since by now no one wanted to miss any of the action—he said he was well aware that Ruysch was unable to conceal his disrespect for him and had been known to ‘bark at him like a mad dog’. Nevertheless, he invited Ruysch to debate with him in writing. Declining to argue with a mere surgeon, ‘because our dispute is beyond his ken’, Van Dortmond bypassed Boekelman and challenged Ruysch to prove that Lysbeth’s injuries had not been caused by a surgical instrument. In his second letter Van Dortmond attempted to ruin both Boekelman’s reputation as a surgeon and his good name as a citizen. Van Dortmond had always recommended Boekelman to the people of consequence with whom he associated, but having received little thanks for his efforts, he now called Boekelman an ingrate and resolved to make his ‘ignorance known to all the world’. In future he would not respond to Boekelman’s assertions, but ‘scorn him as an ignorant idiot and a person of lesser character and quality, and spurn him with a disdainful silence’. Boekelman immediately penned a reply that dealt with every point raised by Van Dortmond, and in order to cast doubt on his credibility, he also painted a ‘psychological portrait’ of his adversary.10 In his view, Van Dortmond’s writings showed him to be ‘a man either lacking in judgement or one who, through arrogance, zeal and selfishness, often gives himself no time for careful consideration’. Moreover, Van Dortmond would never admit to having misjudged a situation, and having done so, would not hesitate to shore up his arguments with ‘falsehoods and lies, even if it shames him’. His actions had been motivated by self-interest: he had attempted to discredit Ruysch and Boekelman— not to redress an injustice, but to reap profit from their downfall. Intimidation A person who had been following the dispute described Van Dortmond’s letters to Ruysch and Boekelman as his death throes. Van Dortmond had supposedly heard about Lysbeth Jans’s retraction of her previous statement, and realizing that his deceit would inevitably 10 Wederlegging van dr. Bonaventura van Dortmonts antwoort op het Nootwendigh Bericht (Rebuttal of Bonaventura van Dortmond’s reply to the necessary notice).

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come to light, he had attempted to divert attention from himself. He had undoubtedly seen that blame would be laid at his door and that it would be impossible for him to disprove Boekelman’s account, so he was now trying to dodge the issue by calling him a person ‘of lesser character and quality’.11 Nor were Boekelman’s opponents inclined to stop there, for they now stepped up their campaign of intimidation. On 3 June, Boekelman received a letter seemingly sent from Haarlem and written in a disguised hand. It was full of slander and threats, and he assumed that its author or authors were hoping that it would silence him.12 Shortly thereafter—on 6 June, Whit Sunday—three men appeared on Lysbeth’s doorstep and ordered the neighbours to make her come out. When Lysbeth refused, the men climbed the stairs to her room. They were apparently surgeons who had decided, on their way to the nearby lazaretto, to come and inquire after her health. She told them that the wound was still bothering her and she was afraid she would never recover. One of the men asked her if the wound was still ‘oozing foul matter’, and Lysbeth told him it was, whereupon the man said: ‘That was happening before you went to the hospital.’ She denied that, as did her landlady, who had washed her before she had been taken to hospital. One of the surgeons turned to the other two and said: ‘So Boekelman will be in the right.’ They argued briefly with Lysbeth and then left. Three days later a man entered the grocer’s shop opposite Lysbeth’s house and asked the grocer’s wife to fetch Lysbeth, who again refused to appear. That evening the three surgeons—among them Bidloo and Coenerding—returned and went upstairs immediately, determined to find out how Lysbeth had been treated by Ruysch and Boekelman. The neighbours had told them that Boekelman had paid her board and lodging for a month. Bidloo began to question Lysbeth about the statements she had made. She said that Ruysch and Boekelman had given her hope, so she had made a formal statement for them, though when asked if she knew exactly what she had signed, she said, ‘Of course not, what do I know of such things?’ When the men continued to press her for details, the landlord intervened: ‘She will say no more. You’ve only come here to interrogate her in the hope of catching her out.’ Then Bidloo and Coenerding started in about the declaration she

11 12

Aanmerkingen, 19. Nader vertoog, 68.

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had made while still in hospital. The landlord said she had been forced to sign it, ‘because they wouldn’t leave her in peace and Dr Dortmond came every day to say that Boekelman and others had described her as a filthy whore who had been ruined by the pox’, thus implying that her condition had been caused by venereal disease. Lysbeth had therefore been intimidated by the doctors while still in hospital, and accused by her fellow patients of being a whore. Despairing, she had succumbed to Van Dortmond’s pressure to sign a statement, fearing that if she refused, they would spread malicious lies about her. When the men questioned Lysbeth about the birth of her child, the landlord put an abrupt end to the conversation. Coenerding ‘grabbed the landlord by his doublet’ and said, ‘I’ll teach you to keep her from speaking. I’ll make her talk in court.’ Cursing, the trio finally left. The slurs began to take effect. Boekelman noticed that fewer people were requesting his services, and after fresh accusations he decided to publish another pamphlet, even though his friends advised him against it.13 In the meantime, he had realized how the rumour that he had ‘screwed open’ Lysbeth Jans had originated. Govert Bidloo used a speculum matricis, a ‘mother mirror’, to extract dead foetuses, and apparently Bidloo assumed that Boekelman did the same. But Boekelman now told his readers that such an instrument was intended for internal examinations and was not at all suited to delivering babies. Boekelman was astonished at such ignorance, but he now understood why Lysbeth had referred in her statement to a ‘screw-like instrument’. It appeared that Bidloo even boasted of it, and invited people to come and inspect it. And now, Boekelman sighed, such people were accusing him of malpractice. Govert Bidloo, clearly a megalomaniac, had recently conceived an ambitious plan to publish an anatomical atlas that would surpass all others. Covering the whole of the human body, it would be the first complete atlas since Vesalius. Three sponsors had been found to fund the publication, and the successful artist Gerard de Lairesse had agreed to illustrate it. Bidloo was to supply the preparations, and De Lairesse would depict them. When Andries Boekelman heard about Bidloo’s

13

Nader vertoog.

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plans for the atlas, he uttered words that proved to be prophetic: ‘Most of the praise will go to the draughtsman and the engraver.’14 Meanwhile Lysbeth Jans was still being treated daily by Ruysch and Boekelman, but by now the walls of her uterus had grown together and she could no longer menstruate. Boekelman said that Lysbeth’s injuries would never heal properly because the gangrene had been allowed to spread. Van Dortmond was to blame, ‘for what should have been kept open (namely the vagina), he had allowed to grow together, and what should have grown together (namely the straight intestine), he had kept open’. Boekelman thought it despicable of Van Dortmond to present Lysbeth’s unhealed wounds as proof of their incompetence: ‘The man boasts that she has not yet recovered as though it does him credit.’ In November, Ruysch and Boekelman, unable to do anything more for Lysbeth Jans, referred her to the regents of the Almshouse. The whole sad affair had left its mark on Boekelman, who suffered that summer from ‘episodes of illness’. Opposing Ruysch While Van Dortmond had voiced his suspicion that Ruysch had had a hand in Boekelman’s writings, Boekelman had already cast doubt on Van Dortmond’s sole authorship of the publications that bore his name. They seemed to contain a variety of styles, which made Boekelman suspect that Van Dortmond had enlisted the help of others to fight his battle. His henchmen had not come out into the open, but it was generally known who they were. Govert Bidloo and Jan Coenerding were among those Boekelman named, but meanwhile others had entered the fray, which had grown into a dispute in which all of Amsterdam, lettered and unlettered, took an interest. The case of Lysbeth Jans soon became a mere pretext for personal vendettas and heated discussions involving deep-rooted differences of opinion unrelated to obstetrics. Boekelman and Van Dortmond, motivated mainly by the desire to uphold their honour and reputation, continued for months (despite Van Dortmond’s promise to keep silent) to produce pamphlets in their defence. But these exchanges were seized by others 14 Nader vertoog, 71. According to Luijelack, ‘the newly engraved plates of the scraggy Vesalius contain as few mistakes as there are lice in a beggar’s coat’ (56).

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as an opportunity to air their own views, not only of Lysbeth’s case but of countless other subjects as well. This was not the first epidemic of pamphleteering that had taken place in these years. The catastrophic events of 1672—including the invasion of the Dutch Republic by France—had opened the floodgates of published opinion, mostly on political and religious subjects, though the theatre’s repertoire had also provoked a vehement public debate. That discussion became entangled with the Ruysch and Boekelman affair, not only because literary life was dominated by physicians, surgeons and apothecaries, but also because the various issues shared a common background. In a number of respects it was a quarrel between the Ancients and the Moderns. Frederik Ruysch had done his best to stay out of the discussions. He had, at any rate, not made his opinion known in writing, unless perhaps as Boekelman’s ghost writer. Even so, he was not spared either, for early on in the conflict an anonymous pamphlet had appeared with the title ‘Political comment on the differences between Mr Bonaventura van Dortmond, physician of the hospital, and the municipal obstetrician and surgeon Frederik Ruysch and Andries Boekelman’.15 The introduction, seemingly polite in tone, argued in favour of midwives learning the work of surgeons: ‘How difficult it must be for an honest woman in the throes of childbirth to admit, in the presence of her own husband, a strange man’s hand into the innermost depths of her reproductive organs’, lamented this author, who thought it possible that women died because they refused to have a man assist them in childbirth. Since Ruysch claimed that it was impossible to injure a woman with his surgical instrument, he should—in the opinion of this author—teach midwives how to use it. The anonymous pamphlet was oozing with animosity towards Ruysch, who was portrayed as a physician ‘who had stumbled into medical practice by way of an apothecary shop’ and who ‘spent most of his time dragging dead horses and cows out of canals and stuffing them’. Ten or eleven years ago it had pleased the authorities to make him the ‘supreme supervisor’ of the surgeons’ guild. It was thought that, despite his lack of surgical training, he would make a success of it, but he had not lived up to expectations. His imperious nature was

15 Staetkundige bedencking over het verschil tusschen den heer Bonaventura Dortmond, doctor van het gasthuijs, en den vroetdoctor en meester Fredericus Ruysch en Andries Boeckelman.

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particularly annoying, as was his tendency to lose his temper whenever he was contradicted. Thinking that his word was law, he obviously lacked the ability to consider both sides of an argument. All of his patience ‘flowed into his hands’, which was why he could ‘peel off the flesh and skin from the branches of veins and arteries’. Ruysch ruled like a tyrant over the guild and anatomical theatre, the author claimed, as evidenced by the ‘cunning schemes’ he devised to prevent Gerard Blaes, professor of anatomy at the Athenaeum, from giving public anatomy lessons. Ruysch, who was clearly ‘a narcissist’, attempted ‘to use his authority to silence everyone else forever’. It was to the detriment of all physicians, the pamphleteer continued, that Ruysch, a doctor of medicine, had accepted the post of municipal obstetrician, thus lowering himself ‘in order to earn a lot of money in a very short time by getting his hands dirty’. Several cases were cited in which Ruysch had proved ill-equipped to handle the situation. Reference was made to the Hooghuijs affair, where he had decided ‘from the stench—and contrary to the opinion of the second midwife—that the child was dead and had therefore extracted it, alive but woefully wounded’. Once, when he had been unable to help a woman in labour, he had called in Rogier van Roonhuijsen, who had quickly delivered the baby. On another occasion he had tormented a woman for three quarters of an hour, and had finally left without delivering the child, leaving behind one of his instruments. The woman was still suffering the consequences of his rough treatment. Ruysch, it was said, had left without even looking back. Ruysch’s adversaries circulated many such stories. It was also rumoured that he had been forced to steal away like a chicken thief from a house on the Herengracht, because a cousin of the childbearing woman had shouted hysterically at the husband: ‘If you insist on handing your wife over to this murderer . . . your soul will suffer everlasting torment, and I shall beg God to punish you on Judgement Day!’16 This suggestion that Ruysch’s reputation was suffering was merely part of the smear campaign. It is difficult to say how much influence such stories had. After ridiculing Ruysch’s imperiousness and casting aspersions on his suitability as municipal obstetrician, his opponents compared the jumped-up apothecary with Van Dortmond, who had been steeped

16

Koeckoecxzangh, 31; Staetkundige Bedencking, 28, 38.

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Fig. 7 Portrait of Gerard Blaes (‘Blasius’), 1625–1692, professor of medicine at the Athenaeum Illustre (Amsterdam City Archives).

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since childhood in the arts, had travelled widely and attended various universities, and had been a highly commended medical practitioner for twice as long as Ruysch. The author was clearly a physician of the old school, but it was not immediately apparent whether he was speaking for himself alone. It was speculated that as many as three or four writers had penned Van Dortmond’s pamphlet, and they could best be sought among those who made common cause with him: the officers of the surgeons’ guild. This assumption was confirmed by a subsequent pamphlet aimed at Ruysch, issued under the name of Paulus Pijl, a down-at-heel surgeon. The contents betrayed the hand of someone other than Pijl, so once again, the real author must have been an officer of the guild, especially because the pamphlet quoted the minutes of one of their meetings. A little book defending Ruysch, titled Luijelack (Lazy-bones), identified the true author of Pijl’s pamphlet as Jan Coenerding, who was also portrayed as the evil genius behind the campaign against Boekelman. Coenerding was said to have spurred Van Dortmond to action and to have taken the initiative for the signed statements cited in his pamphlets. He was also accused of having offered, on behalf of the guild, clothing and surgical instruments (not to mention money and drink) to poor Paulus Pijl (who moved in the same Remonstrant circles as Coenerding). Pijl was in such desperate straits that he had been planning to set sail as a junior ship’s surgeon, leaving his wife and children behind. The only thing he had to do in return was to claim authorship and copy out the pamphlet, so that the original would be in his handwriting. Another wastrel was then paid to distribute the document. In the guise of Paulus Pijl, Coenerding reiterated the themes of the previous pamphlet and declared that Ruysch should not be seen as an oracle: after all, he could boast neither learning nor experience, having spent his youth in an apothecary shop. Moreover, since becoming praelector, he had devoted his free time to painting, instead of studying the books of the Ancients. In Coenerding’s eyes, Ruysch was trespassing on ‘the domain of women’: indeed, he had been forced to learn the tricks of the trade from a midwife in order to practise obstetrics in the first place. Coenerding’s arguments revealed his blatant conservatism: ‘The instruction Ruysch gives to the surgeons is praised so highly, as though they could not learn enough from their masters.’ Coenerding disparaged the ‘leanness’ of Ruysch’s lessons, but the author of Luijelack said that it was only natural to rue the loss of the ‘fat lessons’ that had provided the surgeons with money to squander on food and drink.

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The tenor of Coenerding’s complaint was that Ruysch had come to his city as an outsider and proceeded to lay down the law. The author of Luijelack, siding with Ruysch, refuted Coenerding’s assertions one by one. To begin with, Ruysch was hardly an outsider. He was actually an Amsterdammer through and through, his forefathers having served as magistrates: ‘Pensionary Ruysch, who was sent as a delegate to The Hague, Secretary Ruysch and others too.’ The author was well informed: indeed, the Ruysch family had papers to prove that as early as the fifteenth century their ancestors had served as burgomasters of Amsterdam.17 Ruysch had been accused of miserliness, but the author of Luijelack assured his readers that Ruysch displayed boundless charity when it came to almsgiving. ‘I know that Dr Ruysch is generous. It does not have to be trumpeted from every street corner.’ To Coenerding money was all-important, and he continually accused Ruysch and Boekelman of being equally grasping. They had criticized the officers for purchasing such trifles as ‘silver- and gold-handled lancets, which cost no more than 9 or 10 guilders’, but the guild had just raised Ruysch’s salary by 200 guilders. Luijelack pointed out that one of Ruysch’s predecessors had received 100 guilders for each anatomy lesson, whereas Ruysch had never asked for payment. For that matter, the guild had raised Ruysch’s salary at the behest of the burgomasters, not on its own initiative. Coenerding maintained that Ruysch had violated the officers’ privileges, but Luijelack noted that he had merely put a stop to their lavish feasts, whereas if he had joined in, they would have hailed him as the best praelector in the world. Coenerding also intimated that Ruysch insisted on being present at examinations only for the sake of the extra income, yet as Luijelack rightly declared: ‘This was not Dr Ruysch’s idea, but a rule imposed by the authorities.’ The officers had opposed the measure, of course, because it exposed their unscrupulous practices. Now the guild could no longer accept members who had bribed their way through examinations by donating money for the officers’ dissipation. Was it any wonder that there had been fewer

17

Amsterdam City Archives 5015, Ruysch genealogy by C. Booth. ‘I believe that fellow is the municipal liar, for every time he opens his mouth to yawn, he tells a lie’, according to Luijelack (with reference to Jan Coenerding) (30).

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examinations since their outcome could no longer be determined by such underhand methods? According to Coenerding, the corruption in the guild was due to a surplus of surgeons, whose numbers had increased over the years from several dozen to several hundred. Since there was not enough work in the city for that many, they ‘had reduced one another to poverty through cheap shaving and healing’. Coenerding thought the Collegium Medicum should take steps to limit the number of surgeons by extending the period of apprenticeship and raising examination fees, which would benefit the barber-surgeon shops as well as the guild. He strongly disapproved of the recently implemented, modernized course of training, by which the surgeons’ assistants attended Ruysch’s ‘lean lessons’ and studied a cabinet full of medicinal plants. In those lessons, the erstwhile apothecary Ruysch even ventured to criticize the standard reference work by Johan van Beverwijk, the Inleijdinge tot de Hollandsche Geneesmiddelen (Introduction to the Medicines of Holland). And what was the result of all those newfangled ideas? ‘That a greenhorn, who has heard some talk of the circulation of the blood, lymph, chyle and pancreatic juices . . . dares to defy not only an old master, but also the very best doctors.’ What actually needed to be changed were the examinations given to doctors of medicine, who should not receive a degree until they had studied for at least five or six years. Then an apothecary would think twice before announcing his intention to obtain a degree. A Nobody Besides the anatomical details of Lysbeth Jans’s nether regions, the most important topic of conversation in Amsterdam’s better circles was the authorship of the various pamphlets. Luijelack had unmasked Jan Coenerding and also revealed who was responsible for the ‘Political comment’, the first anonymous pamphlet to attack Ruysch and Boekelman. Although it contained contributions by Coenerding and Govert Bidloo, its principal author was the physician Jan Baptist van Lamzweerde. Van Lamzweerde was a notorious quarrelmonger. Born to a family from Utrecht, he had studied in both Utrecht and Louvain. For the past fifteen years he had been a rather unsuccessful physician in Amsterdam, with mostly Roman Catholic patients. Now, at the age of

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forty-seven, he had a long history of scientific disputes. As a fervent supporter of Aristotle, he had clashed with Johannes de Raey, who taught the Copernican system to his university students. Van Lamzweerde had posted an objection to this heliocentric view of the universe on the wall of the Athenaeum, and had subsequently irritated Van Raey so much that De Raey had ordered him to leave one of his lectures. Theses were regularly defended in the lecture hall of the Athenaeum, and on such occasions one inevitably saw the hunchbacked figure of Van Lamzweerde, with his quick stride and prim mouth. He was often referred to as ‘that prickly fellow’, and it was said he could ‘quarrel enough for six people’ and ‘curse like a trooper’, his abilities in that field being ‘unequalled in the whole of the country’.18 Van Lamzweerde was the one who had dedicated a translation to Ruysch upon his arrival in Amsterdam a decade earlier, but since then he had become more critical of him. Ruysch’s exceptional dissecting skills made him think that his lessons were ‘tantamount to oracles from Apollo’, in the words of Van Lamzweerde, who maintained that anatomical skills did not necessarily make one a good teacher. He derided Ruysch, and scornfully repeated what a surgeon had once told him, namely that Ruysch’s lessons on the male and female genitalia were so frank that they served more ‘to titillate the young men than to instruct the audience’.19 Various pamphlets poked fun at Ruysch’s teaching. One of them compared him with the statue of Goliath now in the Amsterdam Historical Museum but in those days in the Doolhof Park on the Prinsengracht. The statue of Goliath, part of a series of historical and biblical scenes portrayed in the park, could move its head and roll its eyes, just as Ruysch was said to do during his lectures: ‘He cranes his neck and scratches beneath his collar, as though he were being bitten by lice; he rolls his eyes like the giant in the Doolhof, and sticks out his tongue like a chameleon’, according to the pamphleteer. Otherwise nothing much happened during those lessons: when Ruysch was teaching, the guild officers could be seen ‘snoring, with their arms and legs stretched out’.20 With his classical notions of learning, Van Lamzweerde showed little regard for Ruysch, a man of practical wisdom, but he was on good terms with Gerard Blaes, the anatomy professor at the Athenaeum.

18 19 20

Bruijerij, 16–17; Desolaten Boedel II, 9–10; Horrel, 12. Leer om leer, 6–7. Horrel, 16; Schoppen, 19.

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A laudatory poem by Blaes adorned a controversial book Van Lamzweerde had published in 1672. He had translated a surgical handbook and expanded it to include one hundred observations, presented as his own but actually taken from the work of Pietro de Marchetti, a professor at the University of Padua. Unfortunately, the copy of De Marchetti’s book that Van Lamzweerde had consulted belonged to Matthew Slade, whose marginal notes he also borrowed. When his plagiarism was discovered, he said, ‘Oh well, Bartholin did the same at times.’ It was customary for publications to contain recommendations in the form of laudatory poems. Gerard Blaes had promised to write one for Van Lamzweerde’s book, but his failure to do so prompted the author to write one himself and put Blaes’s name to it. The closing stanza articulated Van Lamzweerde’s philosophy: the goddesses of song should praise the man ‘who blends his own with the ancient, thereby completing art’ more highly than the one who, ‘by forging new things, seems to scorn the gods through arrogance’. Van Lamzweerde had certainly not forged anything new, but neither had he made an original contribution to things ancient. Although he always presented himself as someone who strove to bridge the old and the new, he was, in fact, an ardent reactionary. In 1674 he had published a fierce attack on Swammerdam, and had also lambasted Slade and De Raey for turning against the ‘long-blossoming lustre of Aristotle and contemporary Peripatetics’. He voiced his hope of reconciling Aristotle and Descartes, because Descartes’s philosophy did contain some good bits, namely those derived from Plato, Aristotle and Galen. Van Lamzweerde was scoffed at in Amsterdam. When he could not cure the sick, he told them they were bewitched. After repeated house calls, for which he charged a hefty fee, he then claimed that he had broken the spell. Everyone knew he was in debt, and it was rumoured that he presented the families of deceased patients with falsified bills. Yet he fiercely denied all allegations that he was an inept physician: ‘If I am not a good practitioner because I adhere to the Peripatetic philosophy, then neither Galen, Avicenna, Celsus, Fernelus nor most other doctors were good practitioners, though they could cure patients ten times better than present-day physicians with their strange new ways.’21 21

Leer om leer, 18, 32.

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Van Lamzweerde denied that he had written the pamphlets attributed to him, but he confirmed the correctness of what they said about Ruysch: he was a mere apothecary who had risen to the position of doctor and professor, yet he had diminished those professions by accepting the post of municipal obstetrician. He denied fulminating against Ruysch in the pamphlets: ‘Is it fulmination, then, to point out that Dr Ruysch has made grave mistakes, that his learning and experience are not so great, that his word is law to others, that he, a person of far less learning than his predecessors, expects greater consideration from the doctors and guild officers?’ Van Lamzweerde saw a great similarity between Ruysch and Blaes, in that both thought they deserved all manner of privileges. Blaes had stayed in the background during the various debates, so there was speculation as to whose side he was on. The previous year he had dedicated a publication to Van Dortmond, with whom he allegedly sympathized, for (as Van Lamzweerde said) it was thanks to Van Dortmond that Blaes had been given four or five beds in the hospital and had been able to insinuate himself into Ruysch’s practice.22 Blaes had meanwhile received permission to give anatomical demonstrations, though a cynical spectator had said it was not such a good idea, ‘for he plucks and tears the dead as Boekelman the living’. His last anatomy lesson had been so disgusting that one of the city magistrates had almost vomited, and the poor man had not been able to eat meat for a fortnight. Van Lamzweerde discovered that Blaes had not only provided pamphleteers with gossip about him and Van Dortmond but had actively participated in its publication. As soon as Luijelack came off the press, the proofs were taken to Blaes’s house for correction. Van Lamzweerde, resolving to hit back hard, published a devastating open letter, in which he explained to his readers that Blaes had been stirring up trouble because doubt had been cast on his intellectual abilities.23 The Journal des Sçavans of 23 March 1665 had reported that Blaes ‘had little knowledge of medicine and was incapable of making any discoveries’. One could also read the Apologiae Prodromus, in which Niels Stensen recounted his clash with Blaes. And for those who

22

Horrel, 11. Together with his Geluckwensingh, Van Lamzweerde published Toegift aen den scherpzinnighen heer Gerardus Leonardi Blasius. 23

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were still not convinced, Van Lamzweerde quoted another source, in which Blaes was called ‘a useless writer’ and a man ‘of inappropriate and bombastic balderdash’, a characterization apparently seconded by the professors in Utrecht and Leiden. Van Lamzweerde went on to describe how Blaes’s star had begun to rise when he defended the physician Vopiscus Plemp, who had left Amsterdam to take up a teaching post at the University of Louvain. Plemp had been attacked by the Englishman James Primrose, who had earlier opposed Harvey’s theory of circulation. In 1657 Primrose published a book listing four hundred errors in Plemp’s work. Blaes, unable to refute Primrose as he had promised, requested the help of Van Lamzweerde, who wrote the rebuttal that was published in 1659 in Blaes’s name. That publication put Blaes in the good graces of both Plemp and his friend Tulp, and had earned him the reputation of a great theorist. This marked the beginning of Blaes’s career, for that same year he was appointed lecturer at the Athenaeum. Blaes had also been aided by his brother, Johan Blaes, who was gaining recognition as a poet. ‘You undoubtedly know’, Van Lamzweerde wrote, ‘how many Latin verses your brother and I have written for you, which you published under your own name’, in order to gain the favour of some influential gentleman. Indeed, when Blaes had proved incapable of writing the four or five lines he had promised, and Van Lamzweerde had been forced to write the laudatory poem for his own book, Blaes had said, ‘You know full well that I cannot versify. Just write it yourself, and I’ll put my name to it.’24 Then there had been that conflict with Niels Stensen as to who had discovered the duct of the parotid gland. Van Lamzweerde now wished to reveal what had really happened. Stensen had been a student at the time, and since Blaes thought it inappropriate to debate directly with a student, he had arranged for a physician who had recently obtained his doctorate to write him a letter asking for the full facts of the dispute. In his reply, Blaes could then go into the details of the matter, at once preserving his reputation and claiming the discovery. Blaes proceeded to publish two booklets on the research carried out by Swammerdam’s group, giving no credit whatever either to Swammerdam, who had done the bulk of the work, or to the other members of the group. Van Lamzweerde thought it high time to reveal the man’s cowardly and

24

Leer om leer, 22, 25.

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malicious nature. Blaes, he said, enlisted the help of others to attack his rivals or damage the reputation of those who threatened to outshine him, thus managing to stay out of the line of fire. Van Lamzweerde revealed that Blaes had urged him to write a pamphlet criticizing Matthew Slade, ‘to discredit him as an anatomist’. Slade had then written a pasquil satirizing Van Lamzweerde, which he intended to publish anonymously, but had unsuspectingly given the proofs to Blaes for correction. Though Blaes had known what was coming, he had not warned Van Lamzweerde, and afterwards said only that he thought Slade had written the pamphlet. ‘You are the reason I penned writings against Dr Swammerdam’, Van Lamzweerde said, reminding Blaes how threatened he had felt by Swammerdam’s success. Blaes allegedly ‘requested, beseeched, implored’ Van Lamzweerde to thwart his colleague De Raey, complaining that he arrogantly looked down upon him and everyone else. It irked Blaes that no professor dared to contradict De Raey, and he could bear neither De Raey’s imperiousness nor his boasting about his high salary. ‘Thus I often went at your instigation to the Academy, and attacked him more viciously than I would otherwise have done,’ said Van Lamzweerde, to whom Blaes had given De Raey’s theses to refute, and had then made sure that his refutations were published. Swammerdam did not fear Van Lamzweerde’s venomous pen. When Blaes warned him that Van Lamzweerde was planning to publish a piece against him, Swammerdam said that ‘he should go ahead and do it, so that it would become clear to all open-minded and truth-loving readers how little Aristotelian philosophy tallies with the truth’.25 Jan Swammerdam thought that past authors had made the mistake of endlessly poring over books, ‘wrongly imagining all truths to be contained in the ancient and renowned writers’. In addition to Aristotle, he counted Descartes among the writers not to be followed blindly. Although he praised Descartes for his condemnation of sterile learning and his insistence on seeking new insights, Swammerdam believed that ‘one will never understand nature through reason alone, for reason must be inextricably bound to experience, or else one will err eternally’. In that sense he was a kindred spirit of Ruysch, for both men rejected all reason that was not based on observation.

25

Van den Bosch, Antwoort, 13.

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Thus Swammerdam and Ruysch spoke out against the uncritical veneration of the Ancients, and argued that scientists should endeavour, by means of careful study, to arrive independently at the truth. Van Lamzweerde was of a different opinion, but Blaes, he thought, had no opinions whatsoever. He was a ‘nobody’, who even admitted that he knew nothing of philosophy. Another pamphleteer referred to Blaes as the professor ‘who had grown fat on other people’s studies and inventions’, and found it farcical that Blaes had become such good friends with Boekelman, a man he had previously envied and despised.26 Blaes was clearly not on Van Dortmond’s side, but, Van Lamzweerde concluded, Van Dortmond had no reason to mourn this loss, for Blaes would have been to him as Judas was to Jesus. His relations with Bidloo were a case in point: every six weeks they went from war to peace and back again. And so it was with Blaes: ‘What he spews out one day, he slurps up again the next.’27 Blaes’s reaction to Van Lamzweerde’s open letter was characteristic: he thought it beneath his dignity to reply himself, so he left his defence to Petrus van den Bosch, one of his students. Petrus van den Bosch had meanwhile become known as one of the authors who had spoken up for Ruysch. He and a fellow student, Abraham Cyprianus, had penned the anonymous pamphlets in Ruysch’s defence, and were assumed to have done so with the help of their fathers, Gerard van den Bosch and Allard Cyprianus, two surgeons who had opposed the officers of the guild in the corruption case. Their sons were studying at the Athenaeum (with the intention of going to Leiden or elsewhere to obtain a university degree) and were therefore pupils of Blaes. Petrus van den Bosch had another bone to pick with the guild officers, for they had attempted to humiliate him in public in return for what they saw as his father’s betrayal. During Blaes’s last anatomy lesson, two of the officers had tried to remove Petrus, because he had taken a seat in the bench reserved for the physicians. He had refused to budge, protesting that they had no authority to evict him and had merely been ‘driven by the spirit of conceit and ignorance’ to flex their muscles. The officers had gone to the sheriff, who sent a servant to remove Petrus, but Blaes refused to let the servant come upstairs to the

26 27

Onschult, 10. Horrel, 12.

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theatre. In the end the man left without carrying out his orders, and the officers had been obliged to give him half a ducat for coming ‘and a guilder for what he drank’ at a nearby tavern.28 New Knowledge, Old Certainties Naturally there was a lot of talk (and laughter) in Amsterdam about this skirmishing between physicians and surgeons. Barge passengers took great pleasure in reading the pamphlets, in which nearly all the prominent medical practitioners were called by turns ‘idiots and numbskulls’. The pamphlet Luijelack confirmed that it was ‘certainly laughable for those it did not touch, but there were some who got raked over the coals’. The row became so vitriolic that many of the doctors were no longer on speaking terms. Gentlemen who had always politely doffed their hats now pretended not to see one another. In this they differed from the lawyers, who ranted and raved at each other in the courtroom, but once outside sat down companionably to smoke their pipes together. Clearly, there was more at stake here than a few reputations.29 It was, first and foremost, a power struggle, fuelled by ambition. Personal feuds were also being played out, but from the acerbic exchanges it gradually emerged that the quarrel revolved around conflicting philosophies. One observer, who thought that Ruysch and Boekelman seemed to have the advantage, remarked: ‘I hear that everyone is seeking to strengthen his party and win votes.’ Van Dortmond took pride in knowing ‘people of consequence’, but they evidently preferred not to get involved. Ruysch and Boekelman were the most successful in winning the sympathy of the town councillors and the most prominent medical men. Not all of them took sides, however: Matthew Slade, for example, kept aloof in public and Jan Swammerdam did not become involved in the quarrel at all.30 Indeed, Van Lamzweerde doubted whether Swammerdam even knew of its existence. Jan Swammerdam was undoubtedly aware of the conflict, but he no longer had a burning interest in worldly affairs. Having experienced a

28

Aanmerking, 17–18. Koeckoecxzangh, 23. 30 Horrel, 5–6. According to Koeckoecxzangh, Slade, Piso and Veen were among those who sought to blacken Van Dortmond’s reputation (17). 29

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number of personal conflicts, he had been better able to put them in perspective after suffering a breakdown, during which he had asked himself whether his ambition was justified. Addicted to study since boyhood, he had now begun to doubt his motives. How could he reconcile his determination to understand nature with his conviction that nature could not be understood? Perhaps, he thought, he should simply admire Creation and worry instead about his own salvation. Moreover, his studies had been the cause of constant conflict with his father, who continued to pressure him to earn his own living. Overcome by guilt, Swammerdam broke off his studies, which, as he explained, had become such a struggle that he had undertaken them with tears of frustration streaming down his cheeks. It was as though an army were fighting in his head, ‘one side of which moved me powerfully to cleave to God, while the other incited me to go on exploring curiosities’. In the end he had to confess that ‘self-love’ had brought him to the pinnacle of knowledge, because he had never desired money, ‘the greatest idol of present-day Christians’, but rather ‘the idols of my own pleasure and amusement, as well as honour and praise, as a result of which I attempted day and night to surpass others and to outdo them by coming up with ingenious inventions and performing subtle experiments.’31 Swammerdam had sought out Antoinette Bourignon, a woman of about sixty from the French city of Lille, who for several years had been creating a furore in Amsterdam with her pious reflections and criticism of the church and the world. Capitalizing on the doubt sown by discussions of true knowledge, she declared that God had shown her that the Cartesian fallacy was the worst and most accursed of all the heresies the world had ever known. Intrinsic to Descartes’s philosophy was a blatant denial of God, whose place had been usurped by the depraved human mind. She had persuaded Swammerdam that up to then he had been preoccupied with ‘Satanic pleasures’. He accepted her criticism, discontinued his study of nature, and even lived for a time with the members of her sect. But life with Bourignon proved to be a disappointment, and he returned to Amsterdam, where he was forced to move back in with his father. He resumed his nature studies, but denied having any worldly ambitions, having put those behind

31

See Kooijmans, Gevaarlijke kennis, 70–71; Lindeboom, Ontmoeting.

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him when his mental state was at its lowest ebb, at which time he wrote the following verse: I looked at those who spent a life Embroiled in literary strife, Who hoped for an untainted name Despite their rapid rise to fame, And suff ’ring neither need nor plight They studied all the day and night, And thus grew old and grey and frail And briefly wise through great travail.32

Many were impelled by ambition and curiosity to undertake research, but were those legitimate reasons? So many traditional certainties were being undermined by research that many scientists worried about its impact on religion. Jan Swammerdam was certainly not the only one to be plagued by existential doubts. His friend Niels Stensen was wrestling with similar problems. Since moving to Italy, Stensen had become a Roman Catholic and had immersed himself in the study of philosophy to justify his conversion. In a letter to Spinoza, he got to the heart of the problem: for intellectuals like themselves, what could take the place of the certainties they had jettisoned? Stensen pointed out that the Protestant practice of reading the Bible on one’s own merely led to conflict and confusion. He challenged Spinoza’s standpoint that everyone was free to believe what he wanted, as long as it was not a threat to public order, because there was a danger that people less intelligent than Spinoza would be forced to go through life without any guiding principles, and that would not benefit the world. Spiritual guidance was essential for most people, and for that they could best turn to the Catholic Church. Stensen accepted the consequences of his standpoint: he became a priest and then a bishop, and ended up propagating his beliefs among rather unreceptive Germans and Danes. The meaning of new knowledge also played a role in the Ruysch and Boekelman controversy. Ruysch was seen as one who displayed little respect for traditional views. Such willingness to reject time-hallowed truths was considered a sign of arrogance. It was said of the surgeon Allard Cyprianus that he could reveal ‘the precise nature, course and tubes of the lymphatic system’. But was that so important? After all, the art of surgery had done without that knowledge for centuries. More-

32

Lindeboom, Ontmoeting, 51.

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over, the women in the Cyprianus household thought it necessary to discuss religion and similar subjects. His wife even hosted gatherings at which she and other women debated the views of the moderate theologian Johannes Cock. Where such modernism could lead was demonstrated by Swammerdam and Gerard van den Bosch, the other surgeon who had defended Ruysch. Van den Bosch was called ‘the surgeon of the new heaven and earth’, because he had become involved with Jan Rothé, a rather hysterical hellfire preacher who claimed that God had appeared to him during a storm.33 Rothé preached in the streets of The Hague, warning clergymen, regents and heads of state of impending doom. Gerard van den Bosch had been under Rothé’s spell until 1674, when the preacher had been thrown into prison for verbally attacking Willem III. Many of Ruysch’s opponents clearly felt threatened by the craving for new knowledge, which caused people to leave the church and reject their station in life. The son of Gerard van den Bosch was jeered at because, despite his humble birth, he ‘sought to outshine most of the respectable physicians and surgeons’, and dared to wield his pen against learned doctors twice his age. Another example was the surgeon Boekelman, who dared to insult a doctor of medicine like Van Dortmond. Van Lamzweerde alerted his readers to the fact that Boekelman’s supporters were descended from mere ‘tailors, minstrels, publicans, bonnet-makers and hodmen’, whereas Van Dortmond and he came from families who had filled honourable posts for generations.34 Van Dortmond would never aspire to the position of municipal obstetrician; in fact, one of his allies had heard him say that he would ‘prefer to live on bread and water than to bring such disgrace upon all physicians’.35 The Insolvent Estate Among those who thought that independent reasoning and the acquisition of new knowledge would improve the human condition were

33 Horrel, 17, 30. In his youth Van den Bosch ‘went from house to house, reading the Gospels for a penny or a farthing’ (Koeckoecxzangh, 16). See Roldanus, Van Beuningen. 34 Leer om leer, 5, 9. 35 Koeckoecxzangh, 13.

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Fig. 8 The Collegium Medicum, including Bonaventura van Dortmond and Egbert Veen. Painting by Adriaan Backer, 1683 (Amsterdam Historical Museum).

the authors of the pamphlet Den Desolaten Boedel der Medicijne deses Tijdts (The Insolvent Estate of Present-Day Medicine). It was not immediately clear which side had published this booklet, for it poked fun at all parties, albeit only mildly at Ruysch. For example, the remark ‘I pity that zealot with his striding gait’ was meant to evoke the familiar picture of Ruysch: a tall man who took big steps as he resolutely strode down the street. (Elsewhere it was written: ‘Out of haughtiness he takes bigger steps than Mr Ruysch.’)36 The Desolaten Boedel was the first pamphlet to put the conflict in a somewhat broader context. To begin with, it discussed the competition among the various groups of medical practitioners, which formed the backdrop to a number of the conflicts. The fact that much medical care took place outside the official channels—such as in the family circle or the neighbourhood— and involved all kinds of unqualified bunglers and quacks sometimes made it difficult for physicians, surgeons and apothecaries to earn a

36

Horrel, 17.

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living. Forced to think up ways to increase their income, they did not hesitate to cast aspersions on their rivals. The Desolaten Boedel is written in the form of a conversation between a pest-house physician and a hospital apothecary, who scrutinize the state of affairs in the medical world. The ‘estate’ is considered ‘insolvent’ because no one keeps his word or honours agreements. Everyone tries to extend the boundaries of his own territory, not hesitating to overstep them to gain an advantage. In the end it is the patients who suffer. The new knowledge was having a disruptive effect on the medical profession as well, and chemistry was largely to blame. Among physicians it had become fashionable to prescribe chemical remedies, and medical men increasingly viewed the internal workings of the body in terms of chemical processes. Even without that theoretical basis, however, doctors tended to prescribe remedies with an obvious effect, such as opium and mercury. The Desolaten Boedel warned against the dangers posed by some of these cure-alls. New discoveries in the field of chemistry had enabled physicians to fool people into thinking ‘that they alone (secretly) possessed the true panacea that will cure everything’. Even though physicians were not supposed to dispense medicines, many of them carried ointment jars about with them, and handed out potions, pills and suppositories as if they were sweets. The official division of labour called for physicians to prescribe the medicines, and for apothecaries to make them up and sell them. Apothecaries continually complained that the Collegium Medicum—which was supposed to promote their interests, though in fact it was dominated by physicians—did not protect them against the distribution of medicines by doctors. The authorities sided with the doctors. Apothecaries also felt threatened by the herbalists, who lured their customers away by selling laxatives, sweat cures, elixirs and assorted remedies of which they had no understanding, all to the detriment of their clients. ‘If things were as they should be, apothecaries would not be reduced to selling pepper, or bags of raisins to school children.’37 The apothecaries were not immune from criticism either. One of the reasons doctors hesitated to send prescriptions to apothecaries was because some of them had started to act as physicians, visiting the sick and even administering enemas and bleeding patients on their own

37

Bruijerij, 26; Remedie voor den desolaten boedel, 17–18.

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authority. Such apothecaries charged clients for whole series of house calls, as though they were doctors of medicine. There was also friction between physicians and surgeons, partly because physicians had begun to trespass on the surgeons’ territory. Ruysch was not the only one guilty of this. He had a friend who had also studied in Leiden and had specialized in the surgical removal of bladder stones. (He could also ‘make the body numb with a narcotic’, like ‘the best of Mr Ruysch’s embalmed bodies’.) Many surgeons felt threatened by such infringements, and grumbled at doctors who set themselves up as surgeons or obstetricians. Most surgeons, however, lacked the thorough grounding in anatomy necessary to perform such operations, and the officers of the guild did nothing at all to remedy the situation. A surgeon’s capabilities counted for little, according to the Desolaten Boedel, since what mattered most was who ‘could best fashion the burgomaster’s moustache’. Jan Baptist van Lamzweerde soon revealed that the Desolaten Boedel had been produced by the literary society Nil Volentibus Arduum, and that the lawyer Andries Pels and the physicians Lodewijk Meijer and Johannes Bouwmeester were its principal authors.38 As the leaders of Nil Volentibus Arduum, they had been in the limelight several years earlier, when the theatre had been the subject of controversy. Now they had been drawn into the medical conflict for the simple reason that many physicians were active in literary circles. Even though they had seized upon an existing dispute to focus attention on themselves again, there was a certain connection between the battle being fought by Ruysch and their own struggle, which revolved around the theatre’s repertoire. Both Ruysch and the members of Nil Volentibus Arduum attempted to propagate new insights—Ruysch in the anatomical theatre, the writers in the municipal theatre—and both met with resistance. While Ruysch thought that the surgeons’ guild should concern itself primarily with the quality of the training, the officers were mainly interested in the proceeds from the anatomy lessons. The members of Nil Volentibus Arduum encountered a similar attitude among the regents of the two institutions that cared for the poor: the orphanage and the almshouse. Since the proceeds from the Amsterdam theatre

38 He published Geluckwensingh den leden van de vergaderinghe, bekendt door den zinspreuk Nil Volentibus Arduum gedaen over hunne crediteurschap van den Desolaten Boedel.

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went to both institutions, the regents had a vested interest in the repertoire. Preferring popular plays that drew large audiences, they had nothing to complain about as long as the director was the playwright Jan Vos, who put on plays with lots of spectacle, and even had the theatre renovated to accommodate more props and stage machinery. His notion of theatre was controversial, not least because of the resistance to it from Calvinist circles. The dourest Calvinists were completely opposed to it, and described plays as ‘schools of vanity’ that led to immoral behaviour and neglect of duty. Objections were also raised in literary circles, for the prevailing opinion—taken from classical authors—held that art, and thus theatre too, should be edifying. One of the many critics who thought that the theatre was neglecting its educational task was Lodewijk Meijer. He suggested that the directors ask themselves what the point of theatre really was. Did it aim to educate the citizenry, or was its sole objective to entertain people and bring in as much money as possible? The regents of the orphanage and almshouse were unequivocal in their view that ‘one should please the worst people to make money’. Meijer, on the other hand, thought that the theatre directors had a responsibility to themselves. In 1665 he had joined the board, but was forced to resign four years later. He was replaced by Jan Coenerding— dean of the guild and also the surgeon appointed to the Old Men’s Almshouse—who had spoken condescendingly of Meijer. Ruysch and Meijer therefore had a common enemy. Twenty years earlier Jan Coenerding had published Landt-levenslof (In Praise of Country Life), and in 1667 and 1668 he had written two tragedies for the theatre, one of which had a plot borrowed from Cervantes. So there was more on Coenerding’s mind than wine, women and song—and penning vindictive pamphlets. But Coenerding would not be Coenerding if he had not used his place on the theatre’s board for his own financial gain. His barbershop customers were required to pay a yearly sum for shaving, and if they failed to use the full amount, he gave them a free ticket to the theatre. Likewise, in the conflict involving Ruysch and Boekelman, the surgeon recruited to make a sworn statement against them was promised a seat on the theatre’s board of directors. Although he was no longer on the board, Lodewijk Meijer continued to be involved in the theatre’s activities. The literary society he founded along the lines of French and Italian academies functioned as a collective, as did the medical research society headed by Slade and

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Swammerdam. The members took turns writing assigned pieces, and publications appeared under the motto Nil Volentibus Arduum. Like Ruysch, the members of Nil Volentibus Arduum had the sympathy of the intellectual regents, who were well represented among the burgomasters. In 1677, for example, the society agreed to honour Burgomaster Hudde’s request for a translation of the poetry of Juvenal. The burgomasters also requested a volume of Dutch grammar and a book on drama theory. Lodewijk Meijer had a clear idea of the theatre’s purpose: his aim was to present uplifting plays that enlightened and entertained the citizenry without resorting to vulgar humour or cheap thrills. He hoped to inspire the audience to virtue by subtly working on their emotions. Just as Frederik Ruysch used the anatomical theatre to propagate new insights, Lodewijk Meijer and his sympathizers saw the theatre as a platform for conveying ideas. Both Ruysch and the members of Nil Volentibus Arduum were preoccupied with the way in which their insights could best be presented. In displaying his anatomical collection, Ruysch, too, made a ‘tasteful’ appeal to the emotions. But whereas Ruysch was concerned mainly with visual effects, the members of Nil Volentibus Arduum were preoccupied with words, advocating the use of clear language suited to the new, rational, mathematical reasoning and supporting the use of Dutch. Lodewijk Meijer thought it a pity to make young people spend nine or ten years learning Latin. In his view they should read the most important works in translation, and then put their minds to mathematics. A good grounding in mathematics would help them to formulate their ideas clearly, and clear and understandable language would enable them to form their own opinions. Radical Supporters Ruysch stuck strictly to anatomy and obstetrics, but the members of Nil Volentibus Arduum had far grander ambitions. Lodewijk Meijer, who had studied philosophy and medicine in Leiden before setting up a medical practice in Amsterdam, had been involved since his student days with the publication of a Dutch vocabulary book. He championed the scholarly use of Dutch, because he opposed the monopoly of learning held by a small elite educated in Latin. Persuaded by Descartes and Spinoza to think that the world could be improved by giving people the opportunity to acquire knowledge, he was convinced that the only

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way for them to do this was to master mathematical reasoning. Meijer translated Spinoza’s commentary on Descartes’s Principia philosophiae, and created quite a stir when he argued in a book he published anonymously that the Bible should be interpreted by reason, like any piece of writing. Descartes had avoided taking that dangerous step by separating religion and science, but Lodewijk Meijer was undaunted. Because Christians were divided into many denominations and sects, all of whom claimed to find their particular religious truths in the Bible, he set about tackling the root of the problem by advocating for theology what Ruysch advocated for anatomy, namely ‘the renunciation of all prejudices, and a refusal to approve of or affirm anything unless it is comprehended clearly and distinctly’. The Church railed against Meijer’s book, which the Court of Holland banned in 1674—at the Church’s insistence—along with the complete work of Spinoza and Thomas Hobbes’s Leviathan, which had been published in Amsterdam in 1667. Shortly before the publication of Lodewijk Meijer’s work, a book of similar import had appeared with the title Vrije Politijke Stellingen (Liberal Political Propositions). Its author was Frans van den Ende, a former Jesuit schooled in philosophy and medicine, who had meanwhile been executed in Paris. Van den Ende had once been the headmaster of a famous Latin school in Amsterdam. Like Machiavelli and Spinoza, Van den Ende thought that organized religion kept the population under control by exploiting their ignorance. He thought it necessary for people to understand the world, which meant that learning had to be made accessible by using Dutch instead of Latin. In Amsterdam, Van den Ende had managed to stay out of the limelight, but his ideas had been the downfall of Adriaan Koerbagh, a lawyer and fellow physician. Influenced by Van den Ende, Koerbagh had first published a dictionary containing thousands of legal terms.39 In Koerbagh’s opinion, lawyers earned money hand over fist by drawing up documents that ordinary people could not understand. People were kept in virtual slavery, while lawyers owed their power, wealth and status to their exclusive knowledge of the law and legal jargon. Koerbagh waged war against lawyers and clerics alike. In early 1668 it became known that he had published another book, in which

39

’t Nieuw Woordenboek der Regten (The New Dictionary of Law).

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he explained various legal terms and unceremoniously rejected the Trinity, the divinity of Jesus, and the existence of miracles.40 Since that was illegal, the Reformed church council lodged a complaint with the burgomasters and the book was confiscated. Koerbagh, who was soon identified as the author, fled to the sanctuary of Culemborg, where he began to work on a new book, in which he proclaimed that Jesus was human rather than divine, and had been crucified because his teachings were a threat to Roman authority. It seemed unreasonable to Koerbagh to think that Jesus’ death could save others. He portrayed the Bible as an untidy collection of contradictions and denied the existence of miracles, angels, devils, heaven and hell. As soon as his views became known, he was arrested, fined, and sentenced to ten years in the men’s house of correction, to be followed by ten years of banishment. The magistrates were more concerned about the spread of blasphemy and disobedience among the people than about the objectionable passages in his writings. Radical viewpoints were tolerated as long as they were expressed discreetly, but Koerbagh had gone too far. One pamphleteer reported that Koerbagh, who died soon after his conviction, had said in the house of correction that ‘that diabolical doctor Dick (these were his own words) was guiltier than he was of [writing] the book’. While the impetuous Koerbagh was being tried and convicted, ‘Doctor Dick’ had managed to keep such a low profile that he was taken for an ‘orthodox pillar of the church’. The pamphleteer went on to say that the doctor had ‘kept himself in check since his great friend Koerbagh had ended up dying in the house of correction’. ‘Doctor Dick’ was in reality Johannes Bouwmeester, a friend of Lodewijk Meijer and a founding member of Nil Volentibus Arduum. Bouwmeester had studied philosophy and medicine in Leiden, and had spent years in France and Italy before setting up a medical practice in Amsterdam. A versatile physician, he was thought to be brilliant but lazy. (He owed his nickname, Doctor Dick—dik is Dutch for ‘fat’—to

40 Een bloemhof . . . of een vertaaling en uijtlegging van al de Hebreusche, Grieksche, Latijnse, Franse en andere vreemde bastaartwoorden en wijsen van spreeken, die (’t welk te beklaagen is) soo in de Godsgeleertheijd, regtsgeleertheijd, geneeskonst als in andere konsten en weetenschappen . . . in de Nederduijtse taal gebruijkt worden (A flower garden . . . or a translation and explanation of all the Hebrew, Greek, Latin, French and other lamentable loan-words and foreign idioms).

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his corpulence.) His opinions were comparable to those of Spinoza, Van den Ende and Meijer, and he was described by his adversaries as a ‘shifty character and free spirit’.41 It was rumoured that Lodewijk Meijer had written the book that was banned (together with the work of Spinoza) in 1674, but otherwise Nil Volentibus Arduum had been rather quiet since the controversy that had led to the theatre’s closing in 1672. But when the Desolaten Boedel appeared in 1677, Lodewijk Meijer, Johannes Bouwmeester and Andries Pels were suddenly the centre of attention. Pamphleteers writing about ‘the Ruysch affair’ reported that Bouwmeester, while pretending not to be involved in the case, was actually helping to write Boekelman’s pamphlets. They claimed that anyone who peered in the window of Ruysch’s house could see and hear Doctor Dick reading aloud from them.42 Ruysch and Boekelman were supposedly given a lot of support by two other leaders, Meijer and Pels. All three of their supporters were branded a bunch of ‘wordmongers’ by Van Lamzweerde, who reported that Pels had warned Coenerding not to take sides against Boekelman, saying, ‘Watch out! If you oppose him, it will have repercussions that you’ll regret.’ Van Lamzweerde recounted that when the Desolaten Boedel was printed, Pels had gone from house to house to tell his friends that ‘something extraordinary and wonderful had been made public in print’. He had even taken to the streets so that he could hand out the pamphlet personally to acquaintances. As soon as they were unmasked as the authors of the Desolaten Boedel, the members of Nil Volentibus Arduum again became the main attraction in the three-ring pamphlet circus. Lodewijk Meijer, described as ‘short and squat, and inclined to sarcasm and mockery’, was upbraided for ‘blaspheming so abominably in respectable company that the hair of his audience stood on end’. Bouwmeester and Pels were also accused of blasphemy and atheism. Pels was said to have offered to sell his place in heaven for a jug of wine.43 One of the pamphlets, referring to a play by Lodewijk Meijer, suggested that Lysbeth Jans could play the part of ‘The Ghostly Widow’.

41

Onschult 4, 27–28; Horrel, 6–8. Tweede Onschult, 4–5, 31–32. 43 Koeckoecxzangh, 8–11. Pels composed a song for Meijer’s birthday (Pels, Minneliederen en mengelzangen, 53). 42

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The directors of the theatre could also turn the story into a play ‘in the style of Jan Coenerding’, ‘because if Homer and Virgil could write so much about a piece of Helen’s defiled flesh, the golden vulva of Miss Lysbeth deserves no less’. Lodewijk Meijer—author of the Ghulde vlies (Golden Fleece)—could no doubt turn ‘these golden fleeces and tattered labia into a racy tragedy’. One poem included fine stanzas about Ruysch and Boekelman and their radical helpers: Boekelman the loutish liar, Ruysch and Pels, that moron Meyer . . . Look, these men have all been bitten By a dog, whose name is written In our language: arrogance.

Like Ruysch, the members of Nil Volentibus Arduum were reproached for being arrogant and imperious pedants, and as such, a threat to society, since they were the ones ‘who had coined that precious vocabulary of Dr Koerbagh’ and had argued that ‘philosophy was the interpreter of Holy Scripture’. Bent on ‘eradicating the fear of God from the hearts of men’, they were undermining ‘the guilty obedience of subjects to their lawful authority’. The authorities themselves were less afraid, and decided in the autumn to reopen the theatre, having been pressured to do so by the regents of the orphanage and the almshouse, who needed the revenues. The regents would have preferred a theatre director who saw ticket sales as a priority, but the burgomasters (among them Hudde) decided on a compromise. They gave Nil Volentibus Arduum a vote by appointing Meijer, Pels and Bouwmeester to the theatre’s board of directors, alongside three board members with more conservative views. In the medical sector, too, the outcome of the battle was still uncertain: Boekelman had become the examiner, which made him the second most powerful man in the surgeons’ guild, but Jan Coenerding was still dean, and when a seat fell vacant in the Collegium Medicum, it was given to the hospital physician, Bonaventura van Dortmond. In his museum Ruysch placed next to a skeleton of a foetus holding some branches of an ox’s aorta, the motto ‘nil volentibus arduum’ (‘nothing is difficult for those with a will’).44 He would never subscribe

44

AW (Frederik Ruysch, Alle de Werken) 214.

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to Meijer and Bouwmeester’s radical viewpoints, but what he shared with them was their will to explain the structure of the world not by relying on tradition or authority but by following the dictates of their own understanding.

CHAPTER FOUR

RUYSCH AT WORK The conflict of 1677 had caused such a commotion in the medical world that it took a long time before some measure of equilibrium was restored. Only in the spring of 1679 was Frederik Ruysch again willing to give a public anatomy lesson for the surgeons’ guild.1 In the autumn of 1680, Andries Boekelman was asked to treat a woman named Elsje Lourens, whose child had died at birth. Her perineum was torn all the way to the anus, and she had a large hole in the rectum, just above the sphincter. Her stillborn child had been delivered by Govert Bidloo, who had taken a long time to complete the operation and had used a sharp instrument. Boekelman immediately summoned a notary to record the details of the woman’s condition, and sent the notary to Bidloo’s house with a sworn statement in which he referred to Bidloo’s accusations in the case of Lysbeth Jans. The purpose of the notarial act, he told Bidloo, was to show the world ‘how mean-spirited you are’.2 The Surgeons’ Guild Boekelman had meanwhile been joined on the board of the surgeons’ guild by one of his allies, Allard Cyprianus. Govert Bidloo had also become an officer, however, as had Jan Coenerding, who had been kept off the governing board for two years but was reappointed in 1680. When a group portrait was subsequently commissioned, they lined up in brotherly fashion—Coenerding, Cyprianus and Bidloo—

1 On Saturday, 6 May, two criminals were hanged. The body of one of them, the notorious thief Piet Kneppel, was put at the disposal of the guild. On Sunday, 7 May, Ruysch used this body for the first of five public anatomy lessons he gave that week. 2 Amsterdam City Archives, notarial archive 4535, notary Johannes Backer, 9 November 1680, 20 November 1680. In such cases Bidloo’s ‘ostensible knowledge of anatomy’ was of precious little use to him, according to Boekelman. Bidloo had been ill, and when the notary read the statement to him, he replied: ‘I am still so ill that I cannot comment on that; when I am healthy again, I shall reply to his insinuations.’ See AW (Frederik Ruysch, Alle de Werken) 463.

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Fig. 9 The officers of the surgeons’ guild, including Jan Coenerding, Govert Bidloo and Allard Cyprianus, 1679/1680, by Nicolaas Maas (Amsterdam Historical Museum).

but the portrait did not take the traditional form of an anatomy lesson, for the praelector was missing. In the following years, officers were appointed who were sympathetic to Ruysch, but these new appointments did not guarantee peaceful relations. Bidloo and Coenerding had hung their group portrait in a prominent place in the guildhall, but this had meant moving the oldest painting, The Anatomy Lesson of Sebastiaan Egbertsz de Vrij, to a dimly lit corner of the room. The latter painting dated from 1603 and its composition was hopelessly old-fashioned: a straightforward portrayal of the master-surgeons, standing stiffly in three rows. But Sebastiaan Egbertsz had been the guild’s second praelector and a burgomaster to boot. The relocation of his portrait had aroused jealousy and resentment, prompting the five officers chosen in 1682 to restore the old group portrait to its place of honour and banish the new painting to the obscurity of the dark corner. The new officers indignantly declared that ‘the memories of such illustrious gentlemen shall not be dishonoured’.3 Intimidated by Bidloo and Coenerding, whom they 3

Amsterdam City Archives, surgeons’ guild archive 213.

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feared would change the paintings around as soon as they regained power, the new officers called upon the burgomasters, who accordingly decreed that the portraits should never again be moved. The new officers then commissioned their own group portrait, one which portrayed them in the traditional way, as spectators at an anatomical demonstration given by their praelector. Ruysch had already been portrayed as praelector, but in that group portrait—painted by Adriaan Backer in 1670—he had appeared with officers who were not his friends, and in 1679 he had refused to pose for the group portrait with Coenerding and Bidloo. Now he had the opportunity to be portrayed among worthy companions. The commission was given to Johan van Neck, a painter of nearly forty who moved in the same circles as Adriaan Backer. Johan van Neck, who had grown up in a family associated with both artists and physicians, had been apprenticed to Jacob Backer in Amsterdam. According to Arnold Houbraken, who published a collection of biographies of Dutch artists, Van Neck had mastered Backer’s ‘bold handling of the brush’ and ‘powerful manner of painting’, and ‘in addition to his history paintings with clothed figures, he painted splendid nudes and bathing women’. Houbraken went on to describe Van Neck as a man of unimpeachable conduct and ‘a regular churchgoer’, but also a sociable person whose company was much sought after ‘for the sake of his wonderful stories’. Van Neck painted the figures life-size, showing Frederik Ruysch and five of the six officers of the surgeons’ guild, ranged around a dissecting table. Surprisingly, the eye-catching subject of dissection is not an adult but a baby, complete with placenta. Ruysch exhibits the umbilical cord, and next to him stands his ten-year-old son Hendrik, holding up a small skeleton from his father’s collection.4 The new officers, continuing to struggle with ghosts from the past, implemented new rules and regulations. During the board meetings, it had become customary for the officers to consume huge amounts of food and drink, ‘to the great detriment, disrespect and ruination of the

4 The officers portrayed were Anthonie van Paemburg, Abel Horst, Pieter Adriaansz, Andries Boekelman and Jean de Milly. In 1677 it was written about Van Paemburg that ‘that puffed-up fool’ now wears a wig, ‘and so closely resembles Don Quixote with Mambrino’s helmet that he seems to have been cast in the same mould’ (Schoppen, 24). The sixth officer had been portrayed in the previous painting, meanwhile relegated to the dark corner.

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Fig. 10 The Anatomy Lesson of Frederik Ruysch by Jan van Neck, 1683. Those depicted (from left to right) are Anthonie van Paamburg, Abel Horst, Pieter Adriaansz, Andries Boekelman, Jean de Milly, Frederik Ruysch and Hendrik Ruysch (Amsterdam Historical Museum).

honour and good name’ not only of those who indulged to excess but of the guild as a whole. To prevent such shameful behaviour, a rule was passed, forbidding members from having more than 6 stuivers worth of beer brought to the guildhall. Anyone ordering more than that amount had to pay for it out of his own pocket.5 Not all the guild-brothers were moved by the spirit of renewal. When officers’ elections were held in September 1683, a man known for ‘his drinking and scandalous lifestyle’ was nominated, despite vehement protests.6 The officers feared that their good intentions would be thwarted if dubious characters were appointed, and made a motion to strike such candidates from the list by majority vote. After a committee was set up to investigate the financial dealings of Jan Coenerding, peace eventually returned to the guild. Coenerding’s power was waning, and Govert Bidloo had removed himself from the

5 6

Amsterdam City Archives, surgeons’ guild archive 228, 20 January 1683. Amsterdam University Library, MS 1 C 33.

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arena by going to Franeker to obtain his doctorate. This led to the resolution that surgeons who became doctors of medicine could not become officers of the guild. This decision was aimed at preventing conflicts of interest, since a surgeon-cum-physician would also be subject to the authority of the Collegium Medicum. The Battle for Bodies Ruysch considered political developments at least as important as the developments in the guild. The support of the authorities was essential in obtaining certain privileges, such as permission to dissect the corpses of deceased hospital patients. For anatomical research, access to hospital cadavers was vital, since hardly any other material was available. Few criminals were condemned to death, and officially their bodies had to be handed over to the University of Leiden. Even though this ruling was usually circumvented, executed criminals could be dissected only in public anatomy lessons, which were unsuited to serious research. On rare occasions Ruysch received permission from the relatives of a deceased patient to ascertain the cause of death. In 1683, for example, he was allowed to examine the body of a woman who had suffered from dropsy for fifteen years. The following year a solicitor permitted Ruysch to examine the body of his fifteen-month-old daughter, who had died from a swelling in the loins. Ruysch had once treated a woman with a uterine ulcer that had caused continuous bleeding and ‘unspeakable pain, so that she often hoped to die’. When death finally came, her next of kin gave Ruysch permission to conduct a post mortem, which revealed that her cervix was in a state of putrefaction and her intestines had grown together.7 When relatives gave permission for the remains of their loved ones to be examined, it was generally because they wanted to know the reason for their suffering. Often this was unclear, even to the doctors, which is why the examination of corpses was so important. Among the problems that baffled physicians were internal growths. The family of a man who had died of a stomach tumour wanted to know what had tormented him for so long. Ruysch discovered a hard lump at

7

AW 59, 63, 80, 84.

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the bottom of his stomach, ‘almost as large as a fist, filled with a stiff black substance’, and saw that it was the same substance the man had vomited several hours before he died. At the time, doctors could do little with this observation, but continued research enabled them to piece together information until it yielded concrete results. This is why Ruysch regretted the scarcity of cadavers. A boy of eight, tormented by a severe cough and fever, coughed up ‘fleshy particles’ before he died. Ruysch wanted to open up his body, but the boy’s parents refused permission, thus denying him an opportunity to form an opinion on the matter.8 Ruysch likewise saw many patients with pulmonary complaints who suffered from shortness of breath, but he was seldom able to study their remains to determine the cause of their ailments. In the body of one dead woman, Ruysch encountered a stone in the urethra, which had caused it to swell. ‘Curiosity urged me to investigate this further, but I hesitated to cut up the body any more, out of respect for those present’, said Ruysch, who often complained that his research into the cause of death was cut short by protests from the next of kin.9 He and Pieter Adriaansz had once opened up the abdomen of an elderly woman and found her to be full of cysts. They had not been able to determine the nature of the cysts, however, because her ‘headstrong’ relatives had intervened. The same thing happened with a woman who had long suffered unbearable pain, especially when urinating a ‘pus-like’ substance. Ruysch was not able to subject her body to closer examination, because her friends refused to let him perform an autopsy.10 In his professional zeal, Ruysch lamented the fact that some people ‘refuse to give permission for the dead bodies of their deceased friends to be opened up by experienced anatomists and physicians . . . apparently thinking that corpses can still feel pain’. Others thought it scandalous to cut open dead bodies. This was unreasonable, Ruysch felt, because the corpses of royalty were traditionally opened to remove and embalm the internal organs. Medicine was dependent on anatomical study, and even the most experienced physicians knew far too little about the cause of disease. Whatever medical certainties existed had been discovered by dissectionists, but when they were refused

8 9 10

AW 551. AW 1006. AW 89, 131.

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human corpses, they were forced to fall back on animals, which led to misunderstandings that were difficult to eradicate.11 Ruysch thought it useful to dissect animals, but only as material for comparison. There was, he admitted, something to be learned by comparing humans to horses, oxen and whales, for example, but the real work had to be done on human corpses. Ruysch regretted that so many people thought ill of him for requesting permission to examine the deceased. He agreed that the dead should be left in peace, but he could not understand the reluctance to allow an autopsy in the name of science: ‘If it is requested for the sake of knowledge and can serve others by ridding them of ailments, surely there is nothing but good in it.’12 Ruysch was not the only one to voice such concerns; Pieter Adriaansz agreed with him completely. To a doctor who wrote to tell him that ‘tender-hearted women’ had denied him permission to cut open the body of a patient with a cerebral tumour, he replied, ‘Alas! This aversion is felt not only by women, but by many others as well, who often prevent doctors from gaining useful knowledge.’13 Frederik Ruysch and Pieter Adriaansz had developed a certain clinical detachment, but ordinary people shuddered at the thought of cutting up a person’s mortal remains. After all, who could be certain that the soul had left the body? Some people were convinced that the soul remained in the body until Judgement Day, and it was difficult to dispel their fear that anatomizing a body would jeopardize its life in the hereafter. Besides, most people found dissection—even the mere mention of it—a disgusting business. The English physician Martin Lister observed the shock of his travelling companion when they visited the anatomist Joseph-Guichard Duverney in Paris. He considered his reaction understandable: ‘A private anatomy room is to one not accustomed to this kind of manufacture very irksome, if not frightful.’ In Duverney’s study they saw a basket of knives and saws, a skinned leg with the muscles laid bare, an arm in the same state, and a dish of meat, in which the blood vessels and nerves had been examined. Lister thought that ‘if reason, and the good of mankind, did not put men upon this study, it could not be endured,

11 12 13

AW 1040–1041. AW 1120. Muis, XII Tientallen, 307.

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for instinct and nature most certainly abhors the employment’.14 There were even many physicians who could not overcome their feelings of disgust. Some would have liked to make anatomical discoveries, but were ‘too fearful of the cruel knife’ and could not bear the thought of cutting into ‘horrid dead bodies’.15 But those seeking scientific renown had to be prepared to dip their hands into blood and nasty secretions and to brave the sickening stench of putrefaction. Ruysch’s post as forensic physician was another source of material, but even when he was acting in that capacity, there were those who tried to cross him. Sometimes the deceased’s next of kin kept a close eye on him to make sure he did not filch any internal organs. Ruysch’s position as forensic physician had been uncertain for years, but in the summer of 1679 his appointment became official and he was offered an annual salary of 150 guilders. Squabbling among the burgomasters and the magistrates had stood in the way of a formal arrangement, but his definite appointment now ensured Ruysch of the opportunity to examine the victims of violent crimes, including children deliberately drowned in canals or privies. Obviously the hospital was far and away the best source of material, but there, too, the supply was not unlimited, and this provoked fierce competition for the available bodies. During the medical strife of 1677, Govert Bidloo had asked the burgomasters if he ‘could have a corpse or two’, in connection with ‘certain work he had undertaken, in which he intended to portray all the parts of the human body in their true size’. No sooner had Bidloo been given permission to do this than Gerard Blaes approached the regents of the hospital to complain, yet again, about the lack of cadavers, which had been one of his reasons for concentrating on the dissection of animals. In the past he had been allowed, for educational purposes, to dissect the bodies of ‘his’ hospital patients when they died of unusual diseases. Now he came to inform the regents that he, too, was writing an important work, which would entail high printing costs: ‘a dissection of the human body, of all kinds of animals, and of unnatural things found in the human body’. Blaes thought it necessary for a draughtsman to make depictions, and asked

14 15

Lister, A Journey to Paris, 63–64. Medicus politicus, 91.

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for corpses for this purpose, whereupon the regents granted him six cadavers.16 A rising star, the thirty-year-old physician Pieter Guenellon, was also granted permission to use ‘the Anatomy’, the name given to the dissecting room at the hospital. Guenellon, the son of an Amsterdam surgeon of French descent, had been studying in Leiden when an outbreak of the plague prompted him to go to Padua. While in Italy he heard a rumour that all of Leiden’s medical professors had died in the epidemic. He therefore decided to stay in Padua, and after obtaining his doctorate he went to Paris, where he worked for a long time at the Charité Hospital. In Paris he became acquainted with Christiaan Huygens and John Locke. In 1679 he returned to Amsterdam and settled on the Keizersgracht, near the Remonstrant church. Himself a Remonstrant, in April 1680 he married Cornelia Maria Veen, the eighteenyear-old daughter of the influential physician Egbert Veen, likewise a Remonstrant, who soon became dean of the Collegium Medicum. On the occasion of their marriage, the author Gerard Brandt wrote a poem in which he suitably presented the bridegroom as: That most discerning mind, in love with learning, who studied nature, eager as a sleuth, and climbed to heights of wisdom, ever yearning to disprove falsehoods and to seek the truth.17

Guenellon published his views on medical teaching in a book titled Epistolica dissertatio de genuina medicinam instituendi ratione, a study that was announced in the Journal des Sçavans. He expressed his gratitude to Descartes for his mechanistic explanation of medicine, which solved mysteries too minute to be observed, such as how the arteries were joined to the veins. The details of the vascular system, for instance, could not be seen even with the aid of a microscope, but its structure was understandable in mechanistic terms. Guenellon was appointed to a post at the Amsterdam hospital, to replace Jan Swammerdam, who had died in the winter of 1680. In his last years, Swammerdam had been plagued by personal problems and was thus not often seen at the hospital. His father had died unexpectedly in April 1678, which put an end to his financial woes but did

16 17

Amsterdam City Archives, hospital archive 1060. Brandt, Poëzy III, 331.

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not make him any happier. ‘Now I shall have more to live on than I desire’, he wrote to Thévenot. ‘In this world I desire no more than 400 guilders a year to live on and to carry out a few experiments . . . solitude and rest is my element.’ He dreaded the fuss of selling his father’s collection. Dividing up his father’s estate was proving difficult, owing to the greed of his sister and brother-in-law. ‘I wouldn’t bother if I didn’t feel it would be unjust to concede anything to grasping people’, he explained. In the summer of 1678 he had heard that Paolo Boccone (a famous natural scientist who had visited both him and Ruysch several years earlier) was assembling a collection for an Italian prince, who, he hoped, would be interested in his father’s cabinet.18 Swammerdam wanted to sell his own collection as well, but there were no buyers for that either, even when the asking price for the combined collections was lowered from 60,000 to 32,000 guilders. In the end he decided to sell the pieces separately, and the auction was planned for May 1680. Swammerdam had been ill for some time and no longer left his room. A surgeon’s daughter cared for him, and he was visited by his friends, who included Matthew Slade, Frederik Ruysch and Pieter Guenellon. Guenellon advised exercise and fresh air, but Swammerdam would neither leave the house nor take any medicine. He finally ‘forced his advisers to desist by adamantly refusing to talk’.19 On 25 January 1680 he wrote his last will and testament, and died the following month, before the auction took place. Pieter Guenellon, who wrote to Thévenot to tell him about Swammerdam’s last days, reported in the same letter that Coenraad van Beuningen was now a burgomaster ‘and therefore fully capable of favouring me’.20 That summer Guenellon received permission from the burgomasters to dissect corpses from the hospital, ‘just as Dr Johannes Swammerdam was previously permitted to do’.

18 Paolo Boccone (1633–1704), a native of Sicily, was appointed court botanist in Florence and professor in Padua. A collection of letters, written both by and to him, was published in Amsterdam. The twenty-fourth letter—written to Stensen’s friend Francesco Redi (1626–1698), personal physician to the Grand Duke of Tuscany— mentions that he has taken note of the ‘anatomical research of Mr Frederik Ruysch and Mr Jan Swammerdam, doctors of medicine . . . you can imagine seeing human body parts so cleanly dissected & so well preserved by means of some balm they use that you would be surprised to see the cleanliness and the pains they take’ (270). 19 Boerhaave, in Het leven van den schrijver in Bijbel der natuure. 20 Lindeboom, Letters Swammerdam, 167.

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Thus various doctors were demanding corpses from the hospital, and by January 1681 the regents had had enough. ‘Because one or other doctor so often fetches a subject from the hospital without the regents’ consent, in order to anatomize it publicly, in the anatomical theatre of this city, or privately, in someone’s home’, the regents forbade hospital attendants from handing over bodies unless the doctor in question could produce written permission, signed by two members of the governing board.21 Ruysch did not want any constraints placed on his freedom. That month he appealed to the burgomasters, who gave him unlimited access to the corpses at the hospital, though he was required to notify the regents of any dissections he performed. The Amsterdam Hortus Botanicus Frederik Ruysch was also a botanist, of course, and for botanists there was no lack of material in Amsterdam. Since the early seventeenth century, plants of every description from all the newly discovered parts of the world had been imported into Europe, and in Amsterdam they were traded on a large scale. Some of these plants were thought to have healing properties, and the assortment of medicines had therefore expanded so much that regulation was necessary. After a plague epidemic, during which huge differences emerged in the way apothecaries prepared their remedies, the authorities decided to follow the example of such cities as Augsburg, Cologne and London and compile a ‘pharmacopoeia’, a ‘shop book’ that stipulated the therapeutic substances apothecaries were required to have in stock, and how and in what proportions they were to be mixed. This book was published in 1636, after which a quality-control committee—the Collegium Medicum—was set up to ensure that the rules were observed. Its members—physicians and apothecaries, with physicians in the majority—were appointed by the authorities. In order to improve the quality of the remedies on offer, it was decided to have a new hortus medicus, or medicinal garden, laid out in the Reguliershof, a former convent garden outside the city walls. Ornamental plants were soon grown there as well, and so it became a hortus botanicus, or botanical garden.

21

Amsterdam City Archives, hospital archive 1017.

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A great deal of interest was taken in the Asian, American and African plants brought to the Netherlands on ships belonging to the Dutch East India Company (VOC) and Dutch West India Company (WIC). Before the mid-sixteenth century, no more than six hundred species of plants had been cultivated in the gardens of Western Europe, but after 1550 they began to arrive from the Balkans and Turkey, and were grown, among other places, in the Hortus of Leiden University. Among the Turkish plants, the bulbous varieties such as tulips, narcissi and hyacinths were so popular that they were sometimes stolen from the Leiden Hortus. In the course of the seventeenth century, more and more exotic plants were imported and cultivated in heated greenhouses known as ‘orangeries’, where private individuals could grow citrus fruit and tropical plants. In 1665, when the Amsterdam Hortus fell victim to the city extension, it was noted that the cultivation of oranges, limes, myrtle and other ornamental plants was not essential for the fulfilment of its original purpose, and it was decided that in future only medicinal plants would be grown. This was done in a little garden on the hospital grounds, which was adequate for the purpose: apothecaries used the plants as medicinal ingredients, and Gerard Blaes used the garden to instruct his students in botany. Various members of the town council, however, had a passion for ornamental plants as well as good overseas connections, and they hatched ambitious plans for a new botanical garden. The main instigators were the burgomaster Johan Huydecoper and the councilman Jan Commelin, supported by the burgomasters Johannes Hudde and Nicolaas Witsen. Jan Commelin was a good friend of Ruysch. Originally an apothecary with a shop in Kalverstraat, he had grown into a trader of pharmaceutical articles. He bought large quantities of medicinal ingredients from the VOC and the WIC, and sold them to apothecaries and hospitals in Amsterdam and other towns. Through his trading activities, Commelin had become an expert on Asian, African and American plants. He shared his botanical passion with Ruysch, another former apothecary. Ruysch’s first love had been botany, but even though it had been somewhat overshadowed by anatomy, it still occupied a good deal of his time and he cherished his botanical collection. Jan Commelin, now in his fifties, had been twenty-three when he married a daughter of Johannes van Wissel, who ran an apothecary shop. Commelin had chosen his bride from his own milieu, but his commercial activities had made him such a distinguished citizen

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that he now moved in higher circles. One consequence of this was his appointment to several honourable posts, including regent of the women’s house of correction.22 In 1672 he had even become a member of the town council, as a result of the political purge carried out by Willem III. In the course of his social climb, Commelin had moved from Kalverstraat to a canal-side house on the Herengracht, and had bought a country house near Haarlem, where he cultivated exotic plants. His botanical pursuits also led him to make many field trips along waterways such as the River Vecht, where he sometimes encountered Johan Huydecoper. Huydecoper belonged to what he called, in his ornate style, ‘the gallants of Flora’. He indulged his love of plants at Goudestein, his country estate on the River Vecht near Maarssen. Besides serving as burgomaster, Huydecoper was one of the directors of the VOC, a post that enabled him to encourage the import of exotica. A long time before there was any talk of a hortus botanicus in Amsterdam, his acquaintances in Asia and Africa were sending him plants, bulbs and seeds, which he attempted to cultivate at Goudestein. In 1676 he had sent an experienced gardener from Maarssen to the Cape of Good Hope, to supervise the gardeners there. Huydecoper succeeded in having Johan Bacx, the husband of one of his nieces, appointed governor of the Cape, and Bacx subsequently sent him plants and seeds on ships bound for Holland. Bacx had previously held a post in Ceylon, and from there he had sent Huydecoper all kinds of curiosities, such as mangoes, acacias and coconuts. From the Cape, Huydecoper received a collection of dried flowers, and Bacx even commissioned someone to make watercolour drawings of the flora, which he also sent to Amsterdam.23 Many plant fanciers looked forward to these shipments. On 1 March 1679, Huydecoper informed Coenraad van Beuningen that he had received ‘the Cape flower booklet’.

22 In 1669 he was portrayed in this capacity by the painter Karel Dujardin, who had been commissioned to make a group portrait of the regents of the Spinhuis, the women’s house of correction. 23 Huydecoper’s herbarium ended up in the Sloane Herbarium (British Museum for Natural History, nos. 77 and 78). Sloane described its contents as follows: ‘plants gathered at the Cape of Good Hope which belonged to Mr Meerseveen and were bought at the auction of his books in Holland’. In 1704 the herbarium was sold at auction to Hans Sloane for thirty-four guilders. See the Huydecoper archives 57 and 58: 3 September 1671, 26 September 1672, 27 September 1673, 30 November 1676, 9 November 1677, 19 November 1678.

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Fig. 11 Portrait of Jan Commelin (1629–1692) by Gerard Hoet (Amsterdam Historical Museum).

Bacx’s successor continued to send plants, seeds, bulbs and drawings, which Huydecoper supplied to various enthusiasts, including Commelin. On 18 January 1679, for example, Huydecoper recorded in his diary that he had ‘favoured’ Commelin with ‘some seeds from the Cape’. In return Commelin presented Huydecoper with some homegrown oranges and lemons. The area on the right bank of the River Amstel had been fully developed in the years 1660–1680, but stagnating growth meant that little interest was taken in the second part of the extension, on the other

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side of the Amstel. The undeveloped terrain, which was divided into plots suitable for gardens, was baptised ‘the Plantage’. In January 1682 the town council approved a plan to rent these plots to Amsterdammers who wished to lay out gardens. The committee set up to oversee this plan included Johan Huydecoper and Jan Commelin. When the area was parcelled out and two irregular pieces of land were left over, Huydecoper and Commelin seized this opportunity to establish a new hortus botanicus. On behalf of the new Plantage committee, Huydecoper submitted a proposal to the town council, arguing that a botanical garden would not only serve doctors and apothecaries but also beautify the city. Building up a collection of plants would not be a problem, owing to ‘the excellent opportunities this city has to acquire rare and beneficial plants from other regions’. To preserve the plants during the winter, he proposed to build an orangery; accommodation for the custodian would also be needed, as well as a public house to serve refreshments to visiting dignitaries. Altogether these buildings would cost 10,000 guilders. It was thought that the annual expenses, such as the gardener’s salary and the necessary maintenance, could be defrayed by the sale of plants to physicians, apothecaries and other interested parties. Candidates for the apothecary’s examination would be required to make a contribution to the botanical garden. Apothecaries’ assistants would be allowed to visit it twice a week for an annual fee of one guilder. Quacksalvers who paid a fee to the surgeons’ guild for the right to have a stall at the annual fair or the weekly market would be asked to contribute an equal amount to the botanical garden. The general public would be charged an entrance fee.24 In January 1683, Huydecoper and Commelin were appointed to the garden’s supervisory board. That spring, when Huydecoper sent drawings of Cape flowers to the botanist Jacob Breijne in Danzig, he shared the news with him: ‘The city of Amsterdam has had a hortus medicus laid out, with an orangery 130 feet long. Mr Commelin and I have been appointed its supervisors.’ In early 1684, Huydecoper wrote to Commelin about the garden’s funding, saying he thought it vital ‘to discuss the matter with Burgomaster Hudde (the patron of us both)’.25

24

For the history of the Amsterdam Hortus, see Wijnands, Sieraad. Huydecoper to Jacob Breijne, 27 May 1683; Huydecoper to Commelin, 17 February 1684 (The Utrecht Archives, Huydecoper archive 60). 25

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It was no easy task to lay out a botanical garden on the boggy ground, and it was two years before the Amsterdam Hortus was fully operational. In 1684 orange trees, tulips, hyacinths and other bulbs were bought from growers and traders. Asparagus, hollyhocks and olive trees were purchased in 1685, and other plants were acquired at garden auctions. Some plant collectors, including Hudde and Witsen, donated plants to the Hortus. Its finances were settled in March 1685, during Johannes Hudde’s term as president-burgomaster, and its educational task was also formalized: Frederik Ruysch was appointed professor of botany and charged with giving botanical instruction to the surgeons, the apothecaries and their pupils. From the beginning of May until the end of September, Ruysch gave lessons twice a week, teaching the apothecaries and surgeons every Tuesday from 2 to 3 p.m., and their apprentices every Thursday from 11 a.m. to noon. He taught them to recognize medicinal herbs and plants, and explained their therapeutic uses. Other interested parties were also welcome to attend these public lessons. The Collegium Medicum paid Ruysch 200 guilders to give these courses. Gerard Blaes, who had given lessons in the old hospital garden, continued to teach botany at the Athenaeum. Ruysch began his own collection of dried plants. In three years he collected thirty-four ‘herbals’, with ‘all manner of plants, both native and foreign’.26 His lesson material was gathered in the hortus medicus section of the garden, the largest part of which was used to cultivate the exotic plants acquired through the VOC and WIC. Huydecoper, in particular, played an important role in this, but others, such as Hudde, also acted as middlemen. In 1686 tropical plants from Java, Ceylon and Bengal began to arrive, and the Amsterdam Hortus soon became famous for its large collection of tropical and subtropical plants, which were kept alive in heated greenhouses. Although Ruysch was the professor, Jan Commelin, in his capacity as city commissioner, actually ran the Hortus. He was in charge of the prestigious part, which contained the exotic plants. It was he, and not Ruysch, who was chief botanist of the Hortus. Ruysch only provided botanical instruction, but it was Commelin who compiled a descriptive inventory of the collection. An autodidact who had never studied botany at university, he had nevertheless earned a great deal of respect. He had collaborated on a description of plant life in Malabar, and

26

AW 205.

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had also compiled the first descriptive catalogue of the plants in Holland.27 In 1689 he published the first volume of the Hortus’s collection catalogue, which recorded more than two thousand plants, classified according to a system only recently developed by the English botanist John Ray.28 His 1682 Methodus plantarum nova was purchased by the Hortus in 1685, one of the first of such books to be acquired. For centuries the classification of plants had been based on their use to man. It had mainly been physicians who had devoted time to botany, and it was primarily the plants’ medicinal properties that were documented in herbals. It was noted, for example, whether plants were intrinsically hot or cold, since an illness caused by an excess of hot fluids had to be counteracted with cooling medicines. Scientists had just begun to group plants on the basis of their own characteristics, without reference to their medicinal value. Previously they had been so preoccupied with studying their beneficial effects that they had neglected to examine the plants themselves. The function of the stamen, for example, was discovered only in 1682. In his preface to the catalogue, Commelin explained the difficulty of fitting exotic plants into the existing system, saying that botanical knowledge had changed so much in recent years that the classification of plants ‘now took a great deal more thinking’. For Ruysch, anatomy remained his most important work. He played a minor role, though certainly not a negligible one, in describing and classifying the plants in the Hortus, as well as in producing the accompanying depictions. The House on the Bloemgracht In 1685 Frederik Ruysch moved from the Nieuwezijds Achterburgwal to a three-storey house on the Bloemgracht. Located on the south side of the canal (sixth from the corner of the Prinsengracht), this house had a garden and an outbuilding. Ruysch had the façade decorated with the rose that featured in the family arms of his Amsterdam ancestors. 27 Catalogus plantarum indigenarum Hollandiae was published in 1683 in the same volume as Lambert Bidloo’s Dissertatio de re herbaria. 28 The Catalogus plantarum horti medici Amstelodamensis. John Ray had published his Methodus plantarum nova in 1682, after which he began a project aimed at describing all known plants. From 1686 to 1705 he published his multi-volume Historia plantorum.

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Since his marriage, Ruysch’s financial position had improved considerably, thanks to several legacies. When his aunt Catharina Ruysch died in The Hague in 1669, Frederik and his siblings inherited her estate, thus profiting from the shady deals with which her husband, the solicitor Adriaan Boshuijsen, had lined his pockets. Ruysch’s father-in-law, Pieter Post, died that same year, but he had not been wealthy enough to provide his heirs with an inheritance of any significance.29 In fact, Frederik Ruysch owed his prosperity to the offices he held, which provided an income that allowed him to purchase a house costing 8,000 guilders. Ruysch’s house on the Bloemgracht had to accommodate a large family, for by now he had seven children: a son and six daughters. The eldest, Rachel, had shown talent for drawing and painting while still a young girl—a talent undoubtedly inherited from her mother’s side of the family. As mentioned earlier, Rachel’s grandfather, the architect Pieter Post, was also a painter and printmaker, and his brother Frans was an established painter. Her uncles Jan and Maurits Post likewise drew and painted. Her father, too, was an artist of some distinction, who made drawings of his preparations and had also devoted himself to painting. Frederik Ruysch painted what he collected: anatomical objects and botanical specimens, as well as insects, reptiles, fish, and all kinds of unusual animals that had been brought from Asia, Africa and South America. In the pamphlet war of 1677, Frederik Ruysch had been ridiculed for his artistic activities: ‘He paints snakes to portray his venom; he paints toads to express his poisoned nature . . . he paints lobsters to portray his crabbiness . . . he paints trees and woods to chase the officers into them; he paints flowers to learn that all his fine works perish as easily as a wildflower.’ The author of the pamphlet could not imagine that painting such things could shed any light on anatomy.30 Pictures with toads and snakes among flowers and trees had been introduced to Amsterdam by the Dutch painter Otto Marseus van Schrieck, who had worked at princely courts in France and Tuscany. His paintings featured reptiles, snails, toads and insects nestling in

29 The Hague Municipal Archives, notarial archive 368, notary Johan van de Plas, 7 February 1676; notarial archive 149, 16 April 1669. 30 Koeckoecxzangh, 19–20. The estate of his grandson Isaac included a painting by Ruysch of butterflies and other insects. Two paintings by Frederik Ruysch were originally sold as the work of Rachel (Christiaan Kramm, De levens en werken der Hollandsche en Vlaamsche kunstschilders V, 1416).

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semi-darkness—or lurking in luridly lit spaces—among plants and shrubs. (This genre is usually referred to by its Italian name, sottobosco, meaning ‘undergrowth’.) In Italy Otto Marseus had acquired the nickname ‘the sniffer’ (‘de Snuffelaar’), because he often combed the woods to sniff out subject matter. After settling in Amsterdam, he kept animals on a plot of land outside the city. Marseus’s widow told Houbraken, the artists’ biographer, that her husband had gone there every day to feed the animals. Behind their house he had a shed, where he kept the animals he wanted close at hand. According to Houbraken, some snakes had grown so accustomed to him that they remained in the position in which he had placed them until their portrait was finished.31 Otto Marseus did not confine himself to painting; he also studied his animals and passed his observations on to Jan Swammerdam. Such wide-ranging interest was not unique: other painters were also experts on the animals and plants they depicted—Frederik Ruysch for one, although he was an expert who depicted the things he studied, rather than a painter who became an expert on his subject matter. When Otto Marseus died in 1678, Frederik Ruysch bought from his estate three boxes of ‘butterfly wings’ for fifteen guilders, as well as ten guilders’ worth of intact butterflies and forty-one guilders’ worth of paintings.32 At the age of fourteen, Rachel Ruysch was already painting plants and animals with so much enthusiasm and skill that her father gave her permission to train with a painter. This was highly unusual for a girl, but not unheard of. Otto Marseus had meanwhile died, so Rachel was apprenticed to Willem van Aelst, who was considered the best still-life painter in Amsterdam. Van Aelst belonged to the same generation as Otto Marseus, with whom he had worked in his younger years in Florence at the court of the Medici. In the company of another Dutch painter, Matthias Withoos, they had roamed the Tuscan countryside in search of plants and animals. Van Aelst was known as an obstinate man who had dared to quarrel with the burgomaster Johan Huydecoper. According to Houbraken, Van Aelst had once opened his jacket to show Huydecoper the gold chain and medallion he had received from the Grand Duke of Tuscany, and said: ‘You were born with a money-bag around your

31 32

Houbraken, Groote Schouburgh I, 282; Steensma, Otto Marseus. Amsterdam City Archives 5060, 138, fol. 95; 139, fol. 58.

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neck and that is all, but everything I am, I have become by my own merit.’33 Under Van Aelst’s supervision, Rachel Ruysch began by concentrating on sottobosco motifs. Like her father, she worked with great precision and delicacy, laying in a composition and waiting for the paint to dry before using a very fine brush to add insects, blades of grass and small flowers—all as lifelike as possible.34 In her sottobosco depictions she used sponges dipped in paint to indicate the texture of the moss. Like Marseus and Van Aelst before her, she sometimes used real moss to make impressions on the panel. (Marseus had also pressed leaves and even the wings of butterflies into the wet paint.) Rachel’s compositions included plants and animals that do not occur together in nature, and in that sense they were comparable to the displays in her father’s museum, which served as the source for the insects and lizards that appear in her still lifes. Rachel did not confine herself to sottobosco themes, but also applied herself to flower painting in the style of Van Aelst and Jan Davidsz de Heem. Her flower compositions, too, reflect fictitious situations, displaying flowers that bloom in different seasons of the year and cannot be found together in nature. Some of the flowers are exotic and were probably painted after exemplars in the Hortus. Her true-to-life depictions soon earned her a reputation as a still-life painter. According to the prevailing notions of art theory, the depiction of human figures, particularly in allegorical or dramatic scenes, occupied a higher place in the artistic hierarchy than the production of portraits, landscapes or still lifes, and yet these genres were commercially more successful than history painting, since the art-buying public was mainly interested in convincing depictions of everyday subjects they could observe with their own eyes. Everyone who wielded a brush agreed that the goal of painting was to deceive the eye by creating the illusion of reality, but according to classical theory, that reality was supposed to be idealized. Lifelike depictions were thought to be of lesser value, even if convincingly rendered. Painters who were determined to pro33 Houbraken, Groote Schouburgh I, 180. Like Marseus, Van Aelst was no stranger to Rachel’s parents. Frederik Ruysch and Maria Post were accustomed to associating with painters. One of Maria’s sisters was married to a younger brother of the painter Eglon van der Neer. When Rachel Ruysch became an apprentice of Van Aelst, he had just married his maidservant—in Houbraken’s eyes ‘a fat German’—and their marriage had been witnessed by Eglon van der Neer. 34 See the issue of Kunstschrift (2000) devoted to Rachel Ruysch.

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Fig. 12 A painting by Rachel Ruysch of fruit and butterflies (Netherlands Institute for Art History).

duce still lifes therefore depicted beautiful objects, certainly not rotten fruit or withered leaves. A beautiful flower painting could also pass muster, though, and so Rachel’s prestige grew. In the second half of the seventeenth century, flower paintings became increasingly fashionable, and Rachel Ruysch profited accordingly. In 1693 Rachel married the painter Jurriaan Pool, the son of a silversmith. Jurriaan, who was still an infant when he and his eight siblings

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lost their parents, had grown up in the Civic Orphanage. At the time of his marriage he was twenty-seven, two years younger than Rachel. The year after he married, Jurriaan Pool painted a portrait of his father-in-law. This modest-size oval painting shows Frederik Ruysch wearing a splendid periwig. Later on, after becoming an officer in the Guild of St Luke (the painters’ guild), Pool painted a double portrait of two officers of the surgeons’ guild.35 Since Coenerding and Bidloo had had themselves portrayed without the praelector, their example had been followed by various officers. Jurriaan Pool painted another solo portrait, in which Ruysch (again decked out in the obligatory wig) holds a skull in his left hand. Pool made engravings based on both portraits. Rachel was not the first of Ruysch’s daughters to marry: her younger sister Anna had preceded her by five years. Anna, too, was a talented painter. She worked in the same style as Rachel, but unlike Rachel, she did not make painting her profession. Her career ended in the summer of 1688 at the age of twenty-one, when she married Isaak Hellenbroek. Isaak, the son of an Amsterdam merchant, traded in paint. Frederik Ruysch’s sons-in-law therefore came from the world of art, not from the world of medicine. This was unusual, for physicians often encouraged their daughters to marry other physicians, especially if they had no sons to take over the practice. If they did have sons, the addition of a ‘medical’ son-in-law allowed them to build up a small imperium. Pieter Adriaansz, for example, not only trained his son, but also married off his daughter Maria to the surgeon Gommer van Bortel, after which a member of the family was in attendance at nearly every important operation performed in Amsterdam. Frederik Ruysch, who let his daughters marry men from outside the medical profession, put all his cards on his only son, Hendrik, whom he involved from a young age in his work. In hopeful anticipation he had the boy portrayed at the age of ten in Jan van Neck’s Anatomy Lesson of Dr Frederik Ruysch. Hendrik shared in his father’s study of nature, and soon acquired the knowledge and skill needed for his own study of animals (including humans) and plants. In 1690, when he was seventeen, he began a collection of his own with the help of Jan Commelin, who provided him with unusual seeds from the East and West Indies.

35 Pool portrayed Jan Six and Cornelis Boekelman, the son of Andries Boekelman (collection of the Boerhaave Museum).

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Fig. 13 Portrait of Frederik Ruysch by Jurriaan Pool, 1694. In 1772 this painting was given to the Athenaeum by a grandson of Anna Ruysch (Amsterdam University Museum).

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Portrait of Frederik Ruysch by Jurriaan Pool, 1702 (Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, Rotterdam).

The following year the surgeons’ guild presented him with a ‘small memento in silver’ as a token of gratitude for assisting at his father’s public anatomy lessons. In preparation for his doctoral degree, Hendrik attended his father’s classes and some lessons given at the Athenaeum, initially by the elderly Gerard Blaes, and after Blaes’s death by his former pupil and successor, Pieter Bernagie. In 1696 twenty-three-year-old Hendrik obtained his

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Fig. 15 A painting by Anna Ruysch of fruit and butterflies (Netherlands Institute of Art History).

doctorate in Franeker (avoiding Leiden, where his father’s arch-enemy Govert Bidloo was now professor of medicine). By this time he was a fully fledged partner in his father’s ‘business’, and was recognized as such by insiders. He assisted his father at his public dissections and botany classes, and it was also claimed that various observations published by Frederik Ruysch had, in fact, been made by Hendrik. Soon after Hendrik received his doctorate, his sister Pieternel married the apothecary Jan Munnicks, whose father had a medical practice in Amsterdam. In contrast to the Ruysches, who belonged to the orthodox Reformed church, Jan’s family were Remonstrants, and his grandfather, a clergyman, had even been one of the leaders of the Remonstrant community in Utrecht. Many families would have

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objected to this, but Frederik Ruysch did not care about differences in religion. His friends belonged to a variety of denominations. What was more important to him was his son-in-law’s apparent talent for drawing and painting plants, for in 1686 Jan had been commissioned at the age of only thirteen to make watercolours of all the plants in the Amsterdam Hortus.36 He was paid three guilders (and soon four) per watercolour, thus earning between thirty and forty guilders a year. When Jan Commelin announced his intention to publish a catalogue of the Hortus that would contain both written descriptions and illustrations of the plants, Jan Munnicks was asked to make pen-and-ink drawings as models for the engravings that would appear in the catalogue. Meanwhile he sat his apothecary’s examination, during which time his work at the Hortus was temporarily taken over by Alida Withoos, a daughter of the painter Matthias Withoos. Three years later Jan married Pieternel Ruysch. In 1702 the fourth child left the house on the Bloemgracht when Hendrik married, leaving Frederik Ruysch and Maria Post with their daughters Lucretia (24), Maria Jacoba (20) and Elisabeth (18). Hendrik remained in the neighbourhood, going to live on the nearby Prinsengracht. His bride, Siebregje van Neck, was a daughter of the painter who had portrayed him as a boy at his father’s anatomy lesson. Siebregje, a couple of years older than Hendrik, was thirty at the time of their marriage.37 The well-known poet Katharina Lescaille described her in a verse written to mark the occasion: O Siebregje, full of vigour, With face and eyes so friendly, not to mention her fine figure, Exemplary of conduct, with an air that’s quite distinguished, And virtue, kindness, loyalty, a character unblemished, Esteemed by one and all for the endowments of her soul And all that’s pleasing to male eyes, so that they do extol The lively female image.

36 Amsterdam City Archives, Hortus archive 3. Johan Huydecoper had perhaps wanted to send him to the Cape. When Governor Simon van der Stel wrote to Huydecoper from the Cape of Good Hope, requesting that he send a draughtsman and a botanist, Huydecoper replied: ‘I shall look around for the Dutch boy who knows how to handle watercolour and for an unemployed botanist’ (The Utrecht Archives, Huydecoper archive 61, Johan Huydecoper to Van der Stel, 15 December 1686). 37 Amsterdam City Archives, notarial archive 5769 B, notary Laurens van Gangel, 29 October 1705.

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Fig. 16 A watercolour of a pineapple from the hortus botanicus, by Jan Munnicks, from the collection Afteekeningen van verscheijden vreemde gewassen in de Medicijnhoff der stadt Amsteldam (Amsterdam University Library).

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After moving to the Bloemgracht, Ruysch rearranged his collection and began to compile a descriptive inventory. By 1689 his museum was again open to the public, which included various categories of people. Ordinary visitors—those who looked at the objects superficially and viewed the museum as no more than a cabinet of curiosities—were required to pay an entrance fee and were given a tour by one of Ruysch’s daughters. Physicians were admitted free of charge, and Ruysch himself supplied them with the information they sought. For physicians who actually wanted to broaden their knowledge of anatomy, he held classes, using his collection as teaching material. Ruysch had a bilingual catalogue printed for the visitors to his museum. Scholars and foreigners could consult the Latin (Museum Anatomicum Ruyschianum), others the Dutch (Anatomisch cabinet).38 Illustrated with drawings by his own hand, the catalogue was dedicated to Jan Commelin, ‘his benefactor and highly esteemed friend’. In the introduction, dated 9 March 1690, Ruysch explained that he had dedicated the catalogue to Commelin to honour both his extraordinary knowledge of nature and his goodness; the dedication served as an enduring ‘token of our friendship, maintained now for twenty years and more’. The anatomical collection was the heart of the museum, but visitors also showed a great deal of interest in the collection of plants and animals. Ruysch had filled various cupboards and boxes with unusual naturalia from Asia, Africa and America: everything from plants, seeds, birds and butterflies to grasshoppers, beetles, snakes, lizards, fish, shells, marine plants, coral and fossils. In the catalogue he explained how his museum had come into being, starting with his efforts to find an embalming method that preserved soft body parts: ‘While conducting a thorough investigation of the art of embalming, I encountered many curious things that were no trouble at all to preserve: common veins, arteries, lymph vessels, nerves and other parts.’ But there were soon so many of them that one room was not large enough to hold them all: ‘And so I was forced to start a second room, and this one also being insufficient, a third, for the anatomical things only.’ He had also examined and collected plants, both indigenous and foreign, drying

38

AW 149–226.

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them ‘ornamentally’ and eventually filling a whole room with them, while another room was filled with ‘strange creatures’, as well as fish and insects, either stuffed or preserved in alcohol in glass jars.39 It was not unusual for such a collection to cover a variety of fields, reflecting the collector’s wide-ranging curiosity. But some collectors also had scholarly pretensions, and endeavoured to contribute to man’s knowledge of the world. Since nearly every corner of the world had now been explored, work could begin on cataloguing the existent and dismissing the nonexistent. Surprisingly, some seemingly far-fetched stories proved to have a basis in reality, whereas all manner of likely assumptions were contradicted by empirical knowledge. It was therefore important to collect evidence, and the objects gathered by collectors contributed to the sifting of this evidence. Collections of naturalia could be used to prove or disprove the existence of dodos, unicorns, dragons and mermaids, while collections of antique objects and artefacts provided insight into history and foreign cultures. Many collections were a medley of miscellaneous memorabilia: antique and exotic objects exhibited alongside drawings, paintings, maps, globes, instruments and naturalia, though usually the emphasis lay on one of these categories. Frederik Ruysch’s collection consisted almost entirely of naturalia, which included plants and minerals, as well as all parts of the human anatomy. Unusual naturalia were on view in various places, both public and private. Plants brought from far-off lands could be seen in private gardens or in a hortus botanicus. Exotic animals were sometimes kept on country estates and also in special zoological gardens. Anatomical collections, usually housed in university buildings and guildhalls, had at first consisted primarily of skeletons, skulls and sundry bones—the only things that could be preserved until more effective techniques enabled the preservation of other body parts. Louis de Bils was one of the first to cause a stir with preserved body parts, but the first important anatomical museum was that of Frederik Ruysch, whose collection filled ten large cabinets and a number of smaller cupboards. He had many skeletons, particularly of foetuses and newborn babies, and otherwise mainly embalmed preparations—350 objects altogether. Because Ruysch had more to say about some of those objects than would fit into a catalogue, he also published a volume of medical and

39

Foreword to the Eerste anatomische cabinet.

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anatomical observations. When making medical observations, it was customary to refer to illustrations, while setting forth case histories required the naming of witnesses to guarantee credibility. Ruysch could do more than that, however, because he could also refer to the objects in his museum. He thought it extremely important to be able to verify his assertions. Conserving the collection was an extremely expensive undertaking, but well worth the effort: ‘If all anatomists had done this, and if the trouble and expense had not kept them from doing it, our knowledge of the human body would be more advanced.’ He had great faith in empirical study, and thought verifiable observation infinitely preferable to speculation as a means of advancing medical knowledge. If scientists had confined themselves to observation, ‘the youth would not be forced to waste their time debating the existence or non-existence of this or that small particle, which can never be demonstrated anyway’. Illustrations were very useful in conveying knowledge, but still, they were not enough. When Ruysch asked other anatomists to show him a body part he knew only from depictions, they almost always said, ‘That’s what it looked like to me at the time, but I can’t show it to you now.’ ‘And I had to leave it at that,’ Ruysch sighed. ‘Now I preserve everything I depict, so that I needn’t resort to such stupid answers.’40 Ruysch’s museum was not just any old collection of anatomical specimens. Visitors were immediately confronted with a tomb containing various skeletons and skeletal remains. A box with the skull of a newborn baby bore the saying: ‘No head, however strong, escapes cruel death’ (a reference to Horace).41 The tomb also contained the skeleton of a boy of three, holding the skeleton of a parrot, which had been placed there as an allusion to the saying ‘Time flies’. On the right stood the small skeleton of a six-week-old baby holding a flag in its hand, on the left the skeleton of an eight-month-old infant carrying a pike. Ruysch’s presentation of his anatomical collection was in keeping with a tradition in which depictions of skulls and skeletons served as reminders of death. He impressed upon his visitors that death could strike at any moment, and that they should be ready to face it with a clear conscience. This warning was also intended to put life in perspec-

40 41

AW 669, 675. ‘Nullum saeva caput Proserpina fugit’, Horace, Odes I:28, esp. 19–20.

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tive: the body was mortal, but life on earth was only a preamble to what was truly important: life in the hereafter. All worldly ambitions were vanity, no more than a bubble doomed to burst. Anatomy was closely tied to death, and the illustrations in anatomy books often made use of the same vanitas symbols that were used in painting. To illustrate the fleeting nature of luxury, knowledge, power, beauty and pleasure, painters juxtaposed symbols of such earthly things with hourglasses, extinguished candles, ruins, skulls, bones and entire skeletons. The wall of the anatomical theatre in Leiden, where Ruysch had studied, was lined with skeletons, some of which held pennants bearing Latin sayings that emphasized the fragility and ultimate insignificance of the human body. There was even a composition—a male and a female skeleton placed beneath a tree—‘portraying the fact that the sins of our forefathers have brought death to all humankind’.42 The theatre was also decorated with engravings that featured the same subject matter. Ruysch exhibited a very small skeleton of a four-month foetus, arranged in a pose that suggested it was about to strike with a sword. It was meant to illustrate the saying ‘Death spares no one, not even defenceless babes’. A nearby display consisted of the skeleton of an eight-month foetus holding in its right hand a dog’s bladder, which stood for the bubble about to burst. By providing his skeletons with sayings that emphasized man’s mortality, Ruysch was adhering to a long-standing tradition, but his idiosyncratic presentation gave his museum a character all its own. Among the small skeletons in the tomb lay the embalmed body of a premature baby. That Ruysch had been able to preserve a foetus in this way was extraordinary. By 1690 the body, which had been embalmed several years before, was as hard as rock. Ruysch told visitors that its internal organs had not been removed, and pointed out its nearly natural colour, which made it look less macabre. Ruysch had beautified the child in other ways as well, by putting a bouquet in its hand and a crown of flowers on its head. The flowers, too, had been preserved for posterity, inasmuch as Ruysch had prevented the leaves from withering and the colours from fading. Normally flowers were preserved by pressing them between pieces of paper and letting them dry, but this caused them to lose their

42

J.J. Orlers, Beschrijvinge der stadt Leijden. See Luyendijk, Death enlightened.

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natural appearance. In Ruysch’s museum, the flowers looked as though they were blooming. Rachel Ruysch took advantage of her father’s preservation skills, which enabled her to paint bouquets of flowers that bloomed at different times of the year. Ruysch’s collection was compelling because it appealed to viewers’ emotions. Visitors could not help gaping at the skeletons of numerous children: a child of four with a toy in its hands, a five-year-old holding a silk thread with an embalmed heart dangling from it, a girl drying her eyes with a pocket handkerchief.43 The largest part of the collection was kept in ten cabinets, each of which had four or five shelves, but Ruysch had a highly original solution for that part of the collection as well. The objects in his cabinets were arranged randomly rather than systematically, as he felt this would be ‘more pleasing to the eye’. He said it could have been done differently, by ‘filling one cabinet only with human hearts, prepared in various ways, another with small children, another only with children’s heads and so on. And yet such an arrangement would not have been so pleasing to the eye.’44 Ruysch gave a great deal of thought to the presentation of his collection, for he knew that people unused to the sight of human body parts might find it horrifying, and he was determined to make his anatomical work universally acceptable. The use of memento mori images and vanitas symbols served the same purpose as the decorations: they put the horror of death in perspective by stressing the transience of life, by showing that the body was no more than an earthly frame for the soul. The body was beautifully constructed, but its days were numbered. After death it no longer served its purpose, though an anatomist could still make it useful to the living, especially an anatomist like Ruysch, who could preserve body parts from decay. Ruysch claimed that he had been so successful in preserving a five-month foetus that it seemed to be alive. The words he put into its mouth reflected the anatomist’s feeling of power: ‘Untimely was my birth, but timely was my embalming.’ Ruysch literally placed anatomy on a pedestal: for example, he put the embalmed head of a child on a raised platform and decorated it with a pearl-studded laurel wreath. That he managed to surprise his

43 44

‘Omnia sunt homini tenui pendentia filo’ (Ovid, Epistulae ex Ponto IV:3–35). AW 522.

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public rather than horrify them was due mainly to his ability to make his preparations look alive. He did this by placing skeletons in natural poses, for instance, and by giving preparations a lifelike colour. Visitors to his museum were invariably impressed, and more often than not, deeply moved. By presenting his collection in this way, Ruysch expressly drew attention to his special skills, his ‘art’, of which he was exceedingly proud. Of course, the real goal of the anatomist was not to amaze his audience, even though that ambition, too, could be justified, particularly by arguing that it would impress the viewer with the wondrousness of God’s Creation. The ultimate objective of anatomy was to increase man’s knowledge of the structure and workings of the human body. That was what had motivated Ruysch to develop his skills, so that he would be able to make structures visible which would otherwise have remained invisible. Therein lay the significance of his work to science. His embalmed bodies drew a lot of attention, but they were merely the showpieces of the collection. The cabinets mostly contained preparations of organs—from humans as well as animals, particularly horses, cows and sheep—such as genitals, uteruses, placentas, intestines, stomachs, spleens, livers, bladders, kidneys, brains, lungs and hearts. Some had been sliced to show a cross-section; others had been cut open to show the internal structure. He also exhibited curious objects he had found inside these organs, such as gall-stones and kidney stones, as well as a tapeworm, which he kept in a jar of spirits. The various posts Ruysch held were all a source of dissection material. Some body parts had come from condemned criminals whom he had dissected as praelector. Others he had secured in the course of carrying out his duties as municipal obstetrician, forensic physician and instructor of the midwives. The midwives regularly brought him objects—sometimes quite bizarre ones—which they had encountered in their practice. He had at his disposal aborted foetuses and the bodies of deceased hospital patients; he possessed body parts from foetuses that were miscarried, from babies that died shortly after birth, from women who had died in childbirth, and from the victims of accidents. He collected embryos in all stages of growth. Visitors to Ruysch’s museum could follow the development of creatures ranging in size from a grain of sand to full-term babies. The highlights included a four-month foetus, still in the uterus, and an embryo ‘no bigger than a grain of rye’. This last preparation was accompanied by a motto that

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stressed the foolishness of feeling superior to others, given that all people begin as an infinitesimal cell. The catalogue entries contained such facts as the developmental phases of a foetal skeleton. Ruysch pointed out the anatomical differences between boys and girls, and between children and adults. Most of the preparations showed the organ in a state of health, but some served as examples of abnormality or morbidity. Ruysch kept, for instance, the cerebral membrane of a hydrocephalic child and the vertebra of a hunchback. He also preserved a number of objects that were curious in themselves, such as a giant’s left parietal bone, which was ‘so wondrously big that it could serve as a helmet for a human head’. Although it seemed to have come from the head of a huge beast, Ruysch knew better. He had once dissected the head of an elephant, so he knew that this particular bone had come from a human. Interested visitors could view the uterus of a pregnant sea slug, the stomach of a chicken that had swallowed some sewing needles, a large kidney in the shape of a bottle, and a chicken with two beaks. Ruysch preserved the skeleton of a baby with too many fingers, which had been found in a river, as well as the split skull of a condemned murderer, ineptly struck by the executioner’s sword.45 Ruysch had been given a number of unusual objects by people who thought they might interest him. For example, he possessed the shin bones and fibulae of a living person who had lost a limb in an accident. He also had a large stone that Abraham Cyprianus had removed from the bladder of a patient; its surface was so rough that it resembled a large strawberry.46 Two of his preserved hearts were special to him because they had been prepared by Niels Stensen, who had died in the German city of Schwerin in 1686. They were calves’ hearts, according to Ruysch, and ‘after boiling, prepared in such a way that one could see the pattern of the fibres as clear as day’. The hearts had been sent to him from Germany by the anatomist Dirk Kerckrink, who told him that shortly before dying Stensen had prepared the hearts especially for Ruysch. ‘These are the last two objects he prepared, so I preserve them in honour of his memory’, Ruysch explained.47

45 46 47

AW 163, 169, 172, 209, 225. AW 202, 206. AW 807.

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Nevertheless, Ruysch told the visitors to his museum mainly about his own ‘art’, explaining, first of all, how the objects had been prepared. Often they had been inflated with air or injected with liquid wax. A few preparations had been filled with mercury. Many were embalmed, some preserved in alcohol. Ruysch repeatedly pointed out the beauty and delicacy of the preparations, invariably drawing attention to ‘a blood vessel from the placenta, so subtly filled, removed and dried that I’ve never seen or done anything finer in all my life’. He boasted about the longevity of his embalmed preparations: some even dated from his time in The Hague, which meant he had managed to keep them in perfect condition for twenty-five years. In the case of a female foetus preserved in a jar of spirits, he could not conceal his enthusiasm, since he had ‘already kept it for many years in such good condition that it has seemingly been robbed of nothing but its soul’. It had no wrinkles at all, and its colour was so natural that it could have served as a painter’s model.48 Ruysch pointed out the whiteness of the bones he had prepared, and the fact that his skeletons were not kept upright by copper wire, as was usually the case, but stood on their own two feet.49 He was fond of commenting on the presentation: he explained, for example, why he had arranged a small skeleton in a certain pose. Occasionally he even had something to say about the person whose body part was on display. After a journey to Ireland, a friend of Ruysch had complained of such extreme difficulty in having bowel movements that he could produce only ‘a drop at a time, always mixed with a substance resembling blood and pus’. His pain was so disturbing to see that everyone avoided his company. Ruysch could no longer help him, but was given permission to examine him after death to determine the cause of his suffering. There proved to be a huge stone in his kidney, which had caused various organs to become deformed. Ruysch embalmed the affected organs and kept them ‘in memory of a sufferer, and because of the rarity of the case’.50 Ruysch also had a number of organs from a ‘very famous whore, who had died of the Spanish pox’.51 The woman in question was the notorious Anna van Hoorn, whom Ruysch described as ‘very well known at 48 49 50 51

AW 161, 170, 181, 182, 203, 210, 226. AW 568. AW 132. AW 212, 724.

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the time to all those intimately involved in whoredom’. Her ‘Spanish pox’ (syphilis) had been so severe that her bones had become porous and so light that they would float in water. Her skull was so thin as to be translucent when held up to candlelight, and there were even holes in it. Ruysch had preserved her bones and her uterus, and interested parties could see an obstruction in one of her Fallopian tubes. Ruysch’s most valuable skill, however, was his ability to make invisible things visible. He displayed a length of colon, its vessels filled with a wax-like substance that made it look inflamed. The injection of wax enabled one to observe ‘the slenderest of vessels, which one cannot see with the naked eye’. He had also injected the blood vessels of a lung, which ended ‘in minute branches, portraying a tree (which is beautiful to see)’. A large branch of a pulmonary artery had also been filled with wax, ‘enabling us to see more clearly all its branches, even the tiniest’. Admittedly, the ‘tiniest’ could be seen only with the help of a magnifying glass, as was true of the blood vessels in a placenta Ruysch had injected.52 Idle Inventions The specimens in Frederik Ruysch’s collection depended not only on the material at his disposal but also on the development of his skills and on the current scientific debate. Visitors to his museum were told of the importance of his preparations to that debate, to which he contributed in other ways as well: informally, in conversations and correspondence with fellow anatomists, and publicly, during his anatomy lessons and in his published observations. Those observations had been a long time in coming, because Ruysch did his most important work—his anatomical research—in his free time, early in the morning and late at night. ‘Dawn never comes too soon, and night always falls sooner than I should wish’, he declared.53 He earned his living, of course, as both physician and teacher. First of all, there were his weekly classes for the surgeons and the midwives, and from time to time he gave a public anatomy lesson in the anatomical theatre. Then there were private lessons for students and foreign physicians wishing to specialize in anatomy, and he also taught botany at the Hortus. Not 52 53

AW 163, 166, 197, 211, 218, 220. AW 1021.

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only was he involved in the training of surgeons, apothecaries and midwives, but he was required to be present at their examinations. He was, moreover, a practising physician who was consulted chiefly in special cases requiring anatomical knowledge. When a violent crime was committed, the sheriff and magistrates called upon him to examine the victims to determine the nature of their wounds or the cause of death. Ruysch was also consulted in his capacity as municipal obstetrician, when complications arose during deliveries. The rest of his time was spent in his private medical practice, where, in addition to treating patients, he was consulted by fellow physicians who sought his advice in difficult cases. Ruysch maintained that he was too busy to write a serious, scholarly account of his research.54 This was considered a lame excuse even in those days, but it explained why he had not published anything since his book on the lymph vessels. Other renowned physicians and a number of surgeons had published their observations, but tradition dictated that the authors of scientific publications compare their observations to those of others, so that such works were usually studded with references to the literature. Noteworthy discoveries were lent credibility by their comparison to the opinions of authoritative professionals. Those wishing to write had to be well read, and Ruysch’s problem was that he mostly steered his own course and did little research into the scientific literature. By traditional standards he was not especially learned; indeed, he did not conceal his pride at being a practical man. In 1690 Ruysch, by now fifty-two, was experienced enough to publish articles based on his own observations, whose credibility did not depend on statements made by other authors but on the evidence offered by his collection. These observations, gathered over the course of many years as a medical practitioner and practising anatomist, formed a more detailed commentary to the objects in his museum. His Observationem anatomico-chirurgicorum centuria (One hundred anatomical and surgical observations) was published at the same time

54 AW 1100, 1211. In the winter of 1693, Pieter Guenellon informed John Locke about the courses Ruysch gave. During the summer he taught botany in Dutch at the Hortus twice a week: once for the benefit of the surgeons and apothecaries; once for the Athenaeum students. On two other days, mainly in autumn and winter, he taught anatomy and surgery in the Weigh House (Corr. Locke IV, 641). He also gave lessons to the midwives.

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as his museum catalogue, and the two works were available in one volume.55 Ruysch’s procrastination in publishing his observations turned out to have an unfortunate side effect. He remarked, rather bitterly, that a number of them had already been published by people who ‘quietly purloined the occasional remark or specimen, and brought them to light without my permission and without mentioning my name’. In his case histories he did not mention, as others usually did, the names of his patients, because he knew they generally objected. Such discretion could be used by critics to argue against the author’s credibility, but Ruysch was well armed: he had illustrated most of his articles himself and could also refer to his preparations. Often he mentioned the names of people who had been present when the experiment or operation in question had been performed, so that they could corroborate his version of events. Ruysch dedicated his book to the burgomasters—Johan Huydecoper, Johannes Hudde, Nicolaas Witsen and Johan de Vries—who had given him the freedom to dissect corpses in the hospital, and called his work the fruit of twenty-three years of dissection in the hospital and the anatomical theatre. He justified his book with the usual arguments, the main one being that medical science could advance only if its practitioners published their findings, and not—he emphasized—if they succumbed to speculation and ‘idle inventions’. ‘Idle inventions’ was how Ruysch described the ideas propagated by the apostles of the ‘new medicine’—physicians who presented themselves as followers of Descartes. In Amsterdam there was a controversial group of young doctors who believed that medicine required the same radical approach as Descartes’s approach to philosophy. Their determination to do away with Galen and the doctrine of the humours reflected their desire to turn medical science into a completely new and rational discipline. Their criticism touched a sore spot, because even though Galen’s words were no longer law in the field of anatomy and many of his notions of physiology had proved untenable, the lack of a convincing alternative meant that medical practitioners continued to prescribe the traditional remedies. Diagnoses were still based on the doctrine of the humours, and in the case of illness, attempts were still made to eliminate surplus fluids by means of emetics, sudorifics,

55

AW 45–141.

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purgatives, enemas and blood-letting. Ruysch, too, prescribed these treatments, for in this respect he was an ordinary doctor. The ambivalence of physicians was ridiculed in a pamphlet published by an anonymous author from the circle of Cartesians.56 It told the following ‘wondrous tale’: there was great consternation on Mount Parnassus—the mountain sacred to Apollo, god of the arts and of medicine—about a new illness in Holland. The physicians held a meeting, chaired by Hippocrates, to discuss the matter. On one side sat the doctors of the old school, on the other the exponents of the ‘new medicine’. The delegates from Amsterdam were seated at a separate table, because Amsterdam still vacillated between the two groups. Their leader, a tall man, said that he had been sent in his capacity as professor to speak on behalf of the physicians of Amsterdam, a mission he had gladly accepted, knowing full well that because of his age (he was already over forty), he was more skilled in this work than those young men seated beside him, who had just begun their medical practice: ‘I, who teach every week in a language inferior to neither Greek nor Latin, am used to speaking so eloquently that I am not at all ashamed to appear here.’ The irony with which Ruysch was ridiculed was mild compared with the scorn heaped on some of his colleagues. The person mainly responsible was Cornelis Bontekoe, the most vocal prophet of the ‘new medicine’. As a boy, Bontekoe had been apprenticed to a surgeon, but he was determined to study medicine and had therefore gone on his own initiative to Leiden, where he attended the classes given by DeleBoë and Van Horne. Later he would write that DeleBoë’s rejection of the doctrine of the humours had roused Europe ‘from the deep sleep of ignorance’. Bontekoe received his doctorate at the age of twenty and subsequently set up a medical practice in Alkmaar, but after a number of turbulent years he returned to Leiden to study with Theodoor Craanen, a follower of Descartes. He was soon barred from classes, however, owing to his militant anti-Aristotelianism. He then set up as a physician in The Hague, where he gave public lessons and anatomical demonstrations. He proved to be a fierce opponent of the traditional practice of purging and blood-letting, because it was based on 56

Verhael van een wonderlijk gesighte van een kleijn man, op den bergh Parnassis, over dese hedendaegse soo oude als nieuwe philosophen en medecijns (Story of the wondrous tale of a small man on Mount Parnassus, of contemporary philosophers and doctors, both old and new).

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an outmoded concept of physiology, but he had also rejected DeleBoë’s alternative, which reduced all bodily processes to fermentation. In his ‘new medicine’, however, he made frequent use of DeleBoë’s chemical approach, for chemistry, or ‘the science of distillation’, was in his view a ‘miraculous art’, which revealed deeply hidden secrets ‘unrecognizable to the eye, the dissecting knife or the microscope’.57 Bontekoe and physicians who shared his views considered the body a hydraulic machine, consisting of vessels filled with fluids that moved according to the laws of mechanics. Illness caused a malfunction in the flow of these fluids. Poor circulation was no longer attributed to an imbalance of the humours, but to an imbalance of chemical substances. To keep the machine running smoothly, blood-lettings, purges and cooling compresses were of no use whatsoever. By contrast, Bontekoe considered tea extremely wholesome, since it cleansed the blood and was effective against heartburn. He likewise believed that the ingestion of some other relatively new substances—such as coffee, chocolate and tobacco—would allow people to live longer and enjoy a healthier life. He was cynical on the subject of doctors, since they continued against their better judgement to diagnose excesses of ‘hot humours’ and to prescribe cooling remedies. He understood why they clung to this old practice: it was to ‘protect their good name and safeguard their earnings’. But there was no scientific basis for such treatments, Bontekoe maintained, and he scoffed that old-fashioned physicians needed only four things to combat disease: house calls, promises of recovery, time and the occasional prayer. Doctors, for their part, pleaded the benefit of experience and the fact that their tried-and-true methods actually cured patients, but Bontekoe put such recoveries down to luck, rather than the efficacy of the treatments. He claimed that conclusions were drawn before it had been established that the effects were due to their putative causes.58 He went on to say that ‘one must never trust an outcome that runs counter to true reason’.59 Bontekoe also got involved in surgery, publishing a book in which he criticized the training of surgeons: ‘Young boys, still unable to read or write, become apprentices in a surgeon’s shop, where they learn to scrub beards, powder wigs, fashion moustaches, and stick on plasters. 57

Bontekoe, Alle de werken, 383. Bontekoe, ‘Voorreden’ (Foreword) to Alle de philosophische, medicinale en chymische werken. 59 Bontekoe, Vervolg, 45. 58

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They spend several years in this listless way—glancing at five or six books that are full of mistakes and incomprehensible to them—and observe their masters, who are often not the best in their profession. Even those who are competent enough manage matters in such a way that their assistants almost never fathom the secret of their art and never become as skilled as they should be.’60 In 1681 Bontekoe went to Amsterdam, where he moved in with a friend, Pieter Schaep, who had been ousted from the town council in 1672. Bontekoe had offended everyone in The Hague, where practically no doctor would have anything more to do with him. He had hoped to find the people in Amsterdam more sympathetic, but they were also put off by his aggressive and critical manner. He did not think he deserved to be snubbed ‘merely for pointing out that most physicians and surgeons mistreat, harm and often murder their patients’. No doctor would work with him, and he blamed this state of affairs on Egbert Veen, chairman of the Collegium Medicum. Bontekoe inveighed against Veen and his outdated ideas, and expressed his disappointment in Veen’s son-in-law, Pieter Guenellon, who adhered to old-fashioned practices, ‘even though in his book he appeared to be on a better path’. Bontekoe was referring to Guenellon’s book on medical education, published after his return from Paris. Bontekoe reacted to the boycott by provoking a debate. ‘A lot of talking goes on behind my back, but no one dares to take a stand’, he maintained. ‘What will one say of my opponents, whom I have constantly goaded and criticized—as they themselves complain—when they have not dared, the lot of them, to give an answer?’ The one who took up the gauntlet on behalf of Amsterdam’s physicians was the young Pieter Bernagie, a former pupil of Gerard Blaes. Blaes had spoken contemptuously of Bontekoe’s dogmas, but he left it to Bernagie to produce a written rebuttal. Pieter Bernagie was making a name for himself in Amsterdam. The son of a brewer, he had initially been apprenticed to the surgeon Abel Horst, but, like Bontekoe, it was his ambition to become a doctor. After following the preparatory courses at the Athenaeum in Amsterdam, he obtained his doctorate at the age of twenty. In 1677, when the pamphlet war involving Ruysch and Boekelman broke out, he had just received his degree, but was already known as an ambitious young

60

Nieuw gebouw van de chirurgie of heelkonst (New foundations of surgery).

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man and was therefore raked over the coals in the pamphlet Pasquillemakers Hekel (Pasquil-maker’s Heckle) in which it was said that he had collaborated with Van Lamzweerde. The pamphlet ended with a missing person’s report: a young man of twenty-two or twenty-three, ‘the son of a former sutler and later beer brewer at Breda, tall of stature and red of face, with fading yellow hair and bandy legs, suffering a bit from dropsy, always walking about in a listless and dreamy manner, still living last year in Amsterdam as a barber-surgeon’s apprentice, subsequently made a doctor by our hunchbacked Lamzweerde, and finally married to the crippled daughter of a seller of souls’. The advertisement added that the missing person was named after Dr Bernagie. Bernagie’s marriage had set people’s tongues wagging, because his bride was the daughter of a VOC provost, who was known as a crimp, a ‘seller of souls’ who pressed men into naval service. When Bernagie’s wife died in childbirth, he married Van Dortmond’s step-daughter and thus found himself in the conservative camp and not among the adherents of the ‘new medicine’. He was particularly versed in the writings of the Ancients, hence his initial connection with Van Lamzweerde. In the meantime he had joined the ranks of the leading physicians and had become a member of the Amsterdam research society to which Guenellon, Veen, Cyprianus and Slade belonged. Yet Cornelis Bontekoe dismissed Bernagie as a newly fledged doctor, still wet behind the ears. According to Bontekoe, ‘he was bent on being the first person brave enough to take me on’. Bernagie had published solid criticism, but in the eyes of his hot-tempered adversary he had a ‘head full of air, a heart full of malice, a tongue full of venom, and a pen full of lies’, and did nothing but ‘pettifog and dawdle’.61 Bontekoe knew how things stood: ‘My party became too strong, and the drummer Bernagie had to complain about it, in the name of his captain, lieutenant, and other officers and soldiers.’ He suggested that Bernagie’s criticism had been prompted by such people as Veen, Guenellon and Slade, ‘and the kind of renowned men who, in practice, do not know A from B’. They were just as incompetent as Blaes, ‘who simply imitates others’. In Amsterdam, too, Bontekoe remained an outcast. The tormented prophet of the ‘new medicine’ compared himself to Descartes and

61 Bontekoe, Korte verhandeling van ’s menschen leven, gesondheid, siekte en dood (1685).

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to another famous reformer, for he thought that the physicians of Amsterdam had thwarted him just as the Catholics had thwarted Martin Luther when he criticized the sale of indulgences. Bontekoe soon grew tired of Amsterdam and left for Germany. After a short stay in Hamburg, he became the personal physician of the Elector of Brandenburg and was appointed professor in Frankfurt on the Oder. After that, little was heard of him. In 1685 he fell down the stairs, cracked his skull, and died—before reaching the age of forty. Four years later his biography and collected works were published by a kindred spirit, Steven Blankaart, who had taken the torch from Bontekoe. Blankaart, the son of a Franeker professor, produced a stream of writings, the tenor of which was reminiscent of Bontekoe. He thought it nonsense to prescribe purging and blood-letting, and believed that tea and coffee were therapeutic, as were plenty of rest and fresh air. Blankaart agreed that medicine should be rebuilt from the ground up, and had taken the initiative in 1680 to publish a new medical and scientific journal. Rejecting the idle speculations that were rife in medicine before the discovery of the microscope and the emergence of chemistry as a scientific discipline, he called on scientists to share their observations with each other in a journal that would report discoveries in anatomy and chemistry, as well as those made with the aid of the microscope. The response, however, was disappointing.62 To provide the ‘new medicine’ with a firm foundation, Blankaart also ventured into the field of anatomy by publishing De nieuw hervormde anatomie (The new reformed anatomy), in which the notion that the body consisted entirely of vessels containing fluids was presented as the latest insight. He thus rejected the system of Aristotle and Galen, in which it was assumed that the basic bodily functions were governed by invisible ‘spirits’. Frederik Ruysch had not become actively involved in contesting Bontekoe, because the discussion had mainly involved medical practice, but he did respond to the work of Blankaart, even though he did not take it seriously. He was the first to recognize that the invisible ‘spiritus’ was a problematic concept, but he was not impressed with what the ‘new medicine’ proposed to put in its place. It was, admittedly, impossible to prove the existence of Galen’s spirits, but they did

62 Collecteana medico-physica oft Hollands jaar-register der genees- en natuurkundige aanmerkingen van gantsch Europa, 1680–1688.

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account for a number of physiological phenomena for which Blankaart could give no convincing explanation. Ruysch did not think that Blankaart had contributed anything new to the debate; indeed, he even doubted whether the man had ever performed a dissection. Surgery Ruysch’s scepticism of the ‘new medicine’ and the ‘new surgery’ was seconded by the surgeon Wouter Schouten, who was married to a cousin of Maria Post. Schouten, an experienced surgeon known for the widely read account of his journey to the East Indies, proved to be very critical of the new ideas propagated by the likes of Bontekoe and Blankaart. ‘By casting down and overturning an established art like surgery, those “Heroes”, as they call each other in their books, have shamefully scorned all previous writers . . . and thus our old masters as well’, he grumbled. They had taken all the experience garnered over the years and ‘trampled it underfoot, as can be seen in their books, which it pleases them to call New Foundations, New Cabinet of Surgery and so on, in which they promise to show us a much clearer, cleaner and conclusive manner of healing’. The result was catastrophic, according to Schouten, who was utterly convinced of the value of practical experience. He therefore placed surgery above internal medicine in the medical hierarchy, primarily because its practitioners needed to possess skill as well as knowledge: ‘But, in addition to this, surgery is the surest discipline in the field of medicine, because just how uncertain, obscure and dubious internal ailments seem to doctors is shown by the disagreement that emerges at their consultations.’ He also found pharmacology extremely obscure and uncertain: ‘By contrast, the experienced and cautious surgeon examines, feels and treats—more clearly, with his eyes and hands—everything that appears defective, thus performing the experiment of healing on firmer foundations that are visible to all.’63 Ruysch held similar views. The answer to medical uncertainties should not be sought in so-called mathematical reasoning, but in close observation. The articles he published were his answer to the presumptuousness of doctors who based their wisdom on ‘idle inven63 See Van Andel, Chirurgijns, 60. On Schouten, see Baumann, Haarlemsche chirurgijn.

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tions’. Ruysch pointed out the connection between anatomy and surgery, his message being that surgical progress was furthered not by mathematical reasoning but by precise anatomical knowledge. To his great regret, he had been forced to acknowledge that many surgeons were insufficiently aware of this. Ruysch could not imagine ‘surgeons so stupid that they were not ashamed to say that it was enough for them to have a rough idea of the human body’.64 As he had done in his catalogue, Ruysch described both the normal and the abnormal: his patients were not all special cases; many of them had complaints that doctors saw every day. He always tried to find the connection between external symptoms and internal anatomy. Thanks to a man with a broken kneecap, for example, Ruysch was able to devote an article to the structure of the kneecap, which he had researched with Matthew Slade. The fact that kneecaps were hard in skeletons suggested that they were unbreakable, but they hardened as they dried out: examination of fresh corpses revealed kneecaps of which only the outside edge was hard. During dissection Ruysch searched for signs of the deceased’s ailments, but he was not always successful. Once, when he found something strange in a corpse’s gall bladder during a public anatomy lesson, he was unable to link it to any possible symptoms, because neither he nor anyone else in the theatre had known the deceased. In October 1681, however, when Ruysch heard that a notorious thief was to be executed and that he would be allowed to dissect his corpse, he went to visit the condemned man in prison, to ask about his ailments. After the thief had been hanged on the gallows, Ruysch used his body for a whole week of public anatomy lessons, during which he was able to enlighten his audience about the consequences of an unhealed break in one of the bones of the hand. Afterwards, that hand became part of his collection.65 Ruysch frequently mentioned that the body part he was writing about was actually on display at his home. Sometimes he referred to other authors, but he preferred to cite the experiences of colleagues he knew and trusted rather than the scientific literature, most of which had been shown to be full of inaccuracies. He was increasingly reluctant to rely on someone else’s authority, and his scepticism led him to assert,

64 65

AW 85. AW 52–53.

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repeatedly, that what was known about the human body was nothing compared to what was unknown.66 Because doctors were so limited in their ability to cure disease, he preferred to let nature take its course, and opposed operations if they were likely to cause unnecessary pain.67 On the other hand, he agreed with Schouten’s assertion that surgical knowledge was more reliable than the guesswork involved in internal medicine. When an operation proved necessary, patients should try to overcome their fear and place their faith in a competent surgeon. He himself had every confidence in the skills of the best surgeons in the city—men like Pieter Adriaansz, Andries Boekelman and Abraham Cyprianus. It was with such doctors—whose work required the same manual dexterity as that of dissectionists—that Ruysch had the greatest affinity. Furthermore, he could use their practical knowledge in his lessons. In 1694, when he received a corpse for dissection, he let Pieter Adriaansz give the anatomy lesson for the surgeons. Ruysch was extremely interested in new surgical techniques and instruments. He took an active part in the most important operations: obstetrical interventions, amputations, and the removal of kidney and bladder stones. Ruysch knew from experience that kidney and bladder stones could cause fatal blockages and organ deformation, and from his daily medical practice he knew how much pain his patients suffered as a result. ‘Gravel’, the early stages of ‘stone’, was a frequent complaint. Many people occasionally suffered from grit in the urine. Such attacks usually subsided of their own accord, but sometimes stones developed, especially in children, and more often in males than in females. The exact cause was not known, but it was assumed that coarse and incompletely dissolved chyle (the result of an improper diet) encouraged the formation of stones, which often obstructed the bladder opening: ‘To ease the pain, many sufferers lie on their backs, keeping their heads very low’, one stone-cutter reported. Many people spent ‘night after night curled up with their head on their knees’, he said, because otherwise the pain was unbearable. Boys and men were forced to alleviate the pain by ‘pulling on their shaft and foreskin’, and some men constantly had ‘the shaft in their hands’. There were even those who were ‘hunched over from constantly holding the shaft’, and some boys had

66 67

Titsingh, Verdonkerde heelkonst, 576. AW 83, 90, 92.

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‘shafts as big as those of the most robust men from constant pulling and clutching’. There were patients who paced the room ceaselessly, while others sought relief by ‘continuous stamping’. Some, according to the stonecutter, ‘cross their legs when they stand. Indeed, they can often stand no other way . . . Others press their thighs together tightly, to pull the shaft and the bag upwards’. In order to urinate, patients lay on their backs and then turned suddenly, to shift the stone from one place to another. ‘Sufferers tormented by severe pain sometimes stick a finger up their arse, particularly when they cannot pass water’, and ‘bring the finger forward in an attempt to move the stone away from the opening of the bladder’.68 In the long run, patients with such complaints were usually willing to undergo risky and painful operations. After being tied to a high table—thighs against the stomach, heels against the buttocks— the patient was held firmly by a man on either side, while a third stood behind him, pressing down his shoulders. (There was also an assistant, the ‘man on the left’, who helped the surgeon, and another assistant who handed him the instruments and, when they were dirty or bloody, rinsed them in a basin of warm water.) The operation was often accompanied by the patient’s loud screams. Spectators frequently fainted or became nauseated, but the stone-cutter had to keep a cool head. Gommer van Bortel, the son-in-law of Pieter Adriaansz, was known as a very competent surgeon. Whenever he heard a bystander telling a patient to keep still, he said, ‘Let him do whatever he must.’ He believed that patients who screamed were less inclined to tense their muscles than patients who kept still, ‘who often press so hard that it hinders the surgeon’.69 Surgeons did what they could to make the operation less painful and especially less risky, and Ruysch stood by them with his anatomical knowledge. He often examined the position of the stones, to determine how best to remove them. When a patient died, Ruysch—if allowed to cut open the body—could sometimes say what had gone wrong. His collection contained the bladder of a person who had suffered from stones, and he noted that the stones had sometimes become enveloped

68

Denijs, Heelkundige aanmerkingen, 51–59. Titsingh, Steen, 130. Van Bortel could perform any operation ‘without flinching (even if something went wrong)’ (Titsingh, Verdonkerde heelkonst, 245–246). 69

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by growths: ‘Because of this, it occasionally happens that, when removing the stone, the stone-cutter catches hold with the forceps not only of the stone but also of these branch-like growths, which can often cause death.’ When this happened, it was said that the stone and the bladder had grown together, but that was not necessarily the case.70 Ruysch had once found ossified lumps in a cow’s bladder; if these also occurred in humans, it might explain why stone-cutters sometimes failed to isolate the stone.71 Ruysch was also interested in the nature and composition of the stones. He wanted to know how they were formed, so he could explain why an operation sometimes failed because the surgeon was unable to get a good grip on the stone. He had observed that some stones consisted of flakes or scales: ‘This makes it clear that stone-cutters are sometimes unjustly blamed when the stones break into pieces during removal.’72 He supported Johannes Groenevelt—a physician and former student of DeleBoë—who had undertaken a study of stone formation. Groenevelt became a stone-cutter himself, but there was so much competition in Amsterdam that he decided to settle in London.73 Even for patients who survived the stone-cutting, the suffering was not at an end, for incontinence was a common result of such operations. According to Gommer van Bortel, it was ‘quite unusual for patients to be able to hold their urine for the length of a sermon’. If a child who had undergone the operation later asked his schoolmaster for permission to leave the class, and the master said no, that child would ‘certainly wet himself ’. The surgeon Titsingh said that he had ‘given many a boy a coin’ if he had unexpectedly turned up on his doorstep a few weeks after the operation and found him dry.74 Many patients remained ‘leaky’, because the sphincter of the bladder had been damaged during the operation. Such patients could make use of an appliance Andries Boekelman had designed for a man from Aachen, which had enabled him to pass water and hold his urine without discomfort. At Boekelman’s request, the man testified before a notary to the efficacy of the invention.75

70 71 72 73 74 75

AW 538. AW 616. AW 566. British Library, Sloane MS 2729. See Cook, Trials. Titsingh, Steen, 129–130. Amsterdam City Archives, notary Cornelis van Poelenburg, 27 October 1685.

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Boekelman’s appliance was attached to a belt, of the kind to which a truss would normally be secured. If a man wore this device, ‘not a single drop of urine could leak out’, according to a description published in the Leidse Courant of 4 April and again in the Amsterdam newspaper of 9 April 1686. The article pointed out that the many inconveniences faced by incontinent patients included stinking clothes and bed linen, with the result that they were ‘afraid to associate with others’: ‘Master Andries Boekelman—municipal surgeon, rupturespecialist and obstetrician in Amsterdam—has therefore invented a certain appliance, which he has named Clavis Vesicae, or Bladder Spanner, being an instrument worn around the body which enables the patient to hold his water or let it go, as he pleases, and with which he can walk, stand, lie and sleep.’ Boekelman and his heirs had been granted a twenty-five-year patent by the States of Holland, so that no one could copy his invention.76 In the second half of the seventeenth century, the advances made in Amsterdam in lithotomy, or stone-cutting, were due largely to Allard Cyprianus and Pieter Adriaansz, who adopted a new method they had learned from Philippe Colot, a renowned French surgeon. Colot, who had come to Amsterdam to demonstrate his skills, made use of a grooved ‘cutting staff ’ and a large number of other instruments to extract the stone from the bladder.77 After adopting Colot’s method, Allard Cyprianus was repeatedly accused of malpractice—taking unnecessary risks by using new-fangled methods—so he left the art of stone-cutting to his son Abraham, who in 1680 passed his master-proof as a surgeon and also became a doctor of medicine. When his father died in 1683, Abraham applied to succeed him as municipal stonecutter. He was recommended by one and all. Ruysch called him a ‘most expert lithotomist’, and—as the members of the Collegium Medicum bragged to the burgomasters—he was even asked to perform operations in other provinces.78 In Amsterdam he was eventually exempted from the obligation to perform operations under the supervision of guild officers, a rule that had been implemented to prevent the harm

76 Titsingh, Steen, 115–117. In Leiden the instrument-maker Jan van Musschenbroek said that he had already devised a similar aid in 1683, ‘an iron band serving to hold the urine or water’ (The Leiden Regional Archives, notarial archive 1353, notary Van Alkemade, 26 January 1687). 77 Titsingh, Steen, 94–96. 78 Amsterdam City Archives, Collegium Medicum archive 33, 6 October 1683.

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Fig. 17 Instruments used in lithotomy (stone-cutting), from Heelkundige onderwijzingen by Lorenz Heister, edited by Hendrik Ulhoorn. Fig. 1 shows how to restrain a child during the operation. Figs. 2–4 depict cutting-staffs (grooved iron rods, or probes). Fig. 5 represents straight forceps and Fig. 6 curved forceps. Fig. 7 shows forceps designed to break up large stones in the bladder. Fig. 8 depicts an instrument used for making the incision wider. There is also a depiction of a table specially designed for performing lithotomies: ‘B is the place where the patient places his anus; C is the back-rest; D is the rod used to adjust the height of the back-rest.’

often done by unqualified itinerant operators. The guild officers were sticklers for supervision, but Abraham Cyprianus thought it an insult. He objected to being treated like a quack, and he had not forgiven the guild for discrediting his father as a stone-cutter. He agreed with his father, who had said that surgical advancement was hampered by the fact that surgeons were so afraid of damaging their reputations that they seldom ventured to perform difficult operations. His motto was ‘nec timide, nec temere’: neither timidly nor rashly. Ruysch would have thought this a good motto for patients as well: ‘Many serious illnesses could be cured if only patients would have more confidence in the surgeon.’ He cited a number of examples of bravery, including a lawyer by the name of Colijn, who had a growth on the roof of his mouth that Ruysch diagnosed as ‘mortification of the palate’. It called for cauterization, as well as the removal of the ‘flesh-like excrescence’. The patient did not hesitate: Allard Cyprianus and Pieter Adriaansz were summoned, the cauterizing irons were made ready,

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and a number of teeth were pulled, because they were in the surgeons’ way. Colijn was told to raise a finger, ‘as soon as the burning posed any danger of suffocation’. A block of wood was placed between his jaws, so that he could not shut his mouth during the operation. The growth was removed with a sharp, curved knife, after which the red-hot irons were used to cauterize the wound. When Colijn raised his finger, the irons were taken out of his mouth and he was immediately put to bed, where he briefly addressed the doctors ‘with a grimacing smile’. The next day he was running a fever and his head was swollen beyond recognition. The doctors treated the fever and the inflammation that had caused the swelling, but it appeared that a piece of the growth was still in his mouth, and it, too, had to be burned away. ‘Do what you must’, said Colijn, who was forced to undergo the procedure all over again. He recovered, however, whereas another patient, who baulked at the operation and allowed bunglers to treat him, survived—but in agony—for only a few weeks ‘before giving up the ghost’.79 The Workplace The status of Amsterdam’s praelector contrasted greatly with the state of its anatomical theatre. The officers of the surgeons’ guild had informed the burgomasters that the existing anatomical theatre was not just old and dilapidated but in danger of collapse, owing to the crowds who flocked to Ruysch’s anatomical demonstrations. They requested that a new theatre with a rotating dissecting table and a larger auditorium be built. In the winter of 1690 the burgomasters complied, deciding to have a new theatre constructed in the Weigh House on the Nieuwmarkt. That building already housed the guildhall, and until 1639 it had housed the anatomical theatre as well. Now, on the top floor, the new theatre was built in the form of an amphitheatre. It could accommodate five hundred spectators and had a rotating table and a domed ceiling to let in light, which entered through an octagonal tower in the middle of the roof. When the tower was finished in the summer of 1691, a gilded wind-vane bearing the word anatomia was placed on the top. The Weigh House soon became popularly known as the ‘Snijburch’, or ‘Cutting Castle’. Since the building now housed

79

AW 90–93.

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Fig. 18 Illustration of a vagina with hymen from Hondert anatomische en chirurgicaale aanmerkingen, 1690. Ruysch was called to the house of Jan Pietersz, a tobacconist on the Prinsengracht, whose wife was experiencing a difficult delivery. He saw that the hymen was preventing the baby’s passage through the birth canal. At first the situation seemed hopeless, but, Ruysch recounted, ‘to prevent both mother and child from dying simultaneously’, he sent for Pieter Adriaansz, who made a cut in the membrane (between the two Cs in the illustration). ‘And what happened?’ Ruysch continued, ‘Very soon after the operation she gave birth to a live baby, whose cries testified to its strength.’ When Ruysch told this story, the mother was still caring happily for the child whose birth had been so wondrous.

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Fig. 19 The Nieuwe Markt (New Market) with the Weigh House, after renovation (from Caspar Commelin, Beschrijvinge van Amsterdam, published in 1693).

both the anatomical theatre and the guildhall, it was agreed that the guild would pay rent in the form of four per cent per annum of the costs of the renovation. The guild officers had estimated these costs at 3,000–4,000 guilders, so there was great consternation when the total cost came to nearly 10,000. This meant that the guild would have to pay 390 guilders a year for its new headquarters. The officers thought this excessive, but the authorities refused to lower the rent, promising only to pay for new cupboards ‘to display the rarities and embalmed objects, as well as the skeletons’.80 The guildhall and the anatomical theatre were accessible via the stairs in one of the corner towers. Over the door to this tower was the inscription ‘Theatrum Anatomicum’, and above this a niche containing a bust of Hippocrates. The door featured a skeleton painted by Gerard

80

Amsterdam City Archives, surgeons’ guild archive 213.

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de Lairesse, above which appeared the words ‘huc tendimus omnes’ (‘we are all headed for this’). At the top of the stairs was a landing; on the other side of a wooden partition was the guildhall. From the landing one also entered the anatomical theatre. The dissecting table stood in the middle, with eight concentric rows of benches and standing room rising up in tiers. Opposite the public gallery was the professor’s chair. The light entering through the dome fell directly onto the dissecting table. There was also a large copper chandelier with twelve candles, which were lit during dissections. The cupola was decorated with the coats of arms of Ruysch and the guild officers. A Latin verse by Barlaeus was inscribed on the moulding: The criminals hanged on the gallows bring shame on the human race, But they can be of use to us en route to their last resting place.

In the winter of 1691, Ruysch occupied the professor’s chair, giving two week-long public anatomy lessons to inaugurate the new theatre. A chronicle of Amsterdam published in 1693 described the guild’s new accommodations. There were several cupboards in the guildhall’s antechamber: one full of instruments, another with the medicinal plants used in examinations, and a third full of specialist literature. There were also curiosities on display, which, the chronicle said, ‘were prepared by the learned and tireless Frederik Ruysch, professor of anatomy and botany, and his son Hendrik Ruysch, comprising various first-rate anatomical pieces’. The walls of the guildhall (a room eight and a half metres square) were decorated with the skeletons of humans and animals, as well as paintings made ‘by particularly skilful painters, including two done by the renowned Rembrandt, which outshine all the others’.81 In 1711, when the German traveller Zacharias von Uffenbach paid a visit to the Weigh House, he was given a tour by a young man who praised the painting by the door: Rembrandt’s Anatomy Lesson of Dr Joan Deijman, rendered from an angle that compels the viewer to look at the soles of the corpse’s feet. Von Uffenbach, however, preferred the painting to the right of the mantelpiece, The Anatomy Lesson of Dr Tulp, for which an incumbent burgomaster had allegedly offered a substantial sum.

81

Commelin, Beschrijving II, 654.

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Fig. 20 Design for the entrance of the anatomical theatre in the Weigh House, with the bust of Hippocrates and the inscription Huc Tendimus Omnes (Amsterdam City Archives).

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Fig. 21 Ruysch’s coat of arms.

The guildhall made a deep impression on Von Uffenbach. He counted ten large paintings and three small ones. There were few preparations to be seen. On one side of the room, behind a curtain, was a very large female skeleton. Von Uffenbach was shown a drawing of an enormous human skull, so large that it seemed like an elephant’s, though it was said to be the skull of a man who had lived in Amsterdam. His lower jaw was in Ruysch’s collection. Von Uffenbach found the anatomical theatre ‘very spacious, comfortable and elegant, also much better than the one in Leiden. There is, however, nothing to be seen in it but the benches.’ In the middle he saw a chandelier, and there was a pulpit for the lectures sometimes given there. ‘Above this pulpit stands a stuffed baby elephant, which Mr Ruysch is said to have kept while alive.’ In the cupola Van Uffenbach noticed Ruysch’s coat of arms, painted in the middle of the ceiling.82 82 Von Uffenbach, Merkwürdige Reisen III, 546–548. Reproduced in Kurpershoek, Waag, 55.

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Fig. 22 Interior of the anatomical theatre (Amsterdam City Archives).

The anatomical theatre was Ruysch’s domain, the arena where he was allowed to demonstrate his skills. A public anatomy lesson was indeed a theatrical performance, and many of those in the audience were invited guests of some distinction, which made it necessary to regulate the seating arrangements. The first row was reserved for the regents, the members of the Collegium Medicum, and doctors over the age of fifty. The second and third rows were reserved for the younger doctors, the officers of the guild, and surgeons over the age of fifty. Rows four to six accommodated the remaining surgeons, and rows seven and eight (the uppermost rows) their apprentices and members of the paying public. The popularity of the event meant that apprentices could earn some extra money by charging a fee for the use of their lesson handouts, which served as admission tickets. The guild used the proceeds to defray the cost of the equipment (candles, dissecting knives and other implements), the burial of the corpse, and the wages of the assistants and sheriff’s servants, who kept order and ensured that everything ran smoothly. Whatever remained was spent, in accordance with a timehonoured tradition, on wine, meat, fish and tobacco for the surgeons, and biscuits for the apprentices and servants. Unfortunately, a public anatomy lesson could not be given every year. Not only did the weather have to be cold enough, but the event could not be held without a condemned criminal. These two conditions were seldom met simultaneously, since there were only about three

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executions a year, and to be eligible for dissection, the condemned had to be a stranger with no relatives in the city. But even when there were no dissections, the anatomical theatre was visited regularly by Dutch people and foreigners alike, who were interested in the paintings, the library and the curiosities. Apart from the skin of a criminal dissected in 1550, the skeleton of an English pirate (dissected in 1615) and the skull of a pygmy, there were mainly stuffed animals on view, including a West Indian snake sent to Dr Tulp and donated by him to the guild, a ‘mouse with wings’, a swan (donated by a journeyman-surgeon), several dogs and cats, and, since 1663, a lion. Among the curiosities on display in the Weigh House were also two fish heads, which were widely held to be the heads of unicorns. This was contested, however, because their so-called horn did not grow out of the forehead, but out of the upper jaw. It was therefore thought to be a tooth of some sort, perhaps comparable to the tusks sported by elephants, walruses and sea-cows. The truth about the ‘unicorn’ was finally revealed by a German sea captain, who had sailed from the Netherlands to Greenland in 1684 and returned with just such a double-toothed fish. The guild cherished these objects, but as a collection the guild’s curiosities were nothing compared with Ruysch’s private museum. The anatomical theatre in the Weigh House was his workplace, and he helped to lend it an air of dignity, but his life’s work was the collection he kept at his house on the Bloemgracht.

CHAPTER FIVE

RIVALS In the early 1690s, Frederik Ruysch managed with the help of his son to perfect his preparation method, which made ‘the tiniest parts of the human body clear to the eye’.1 From the very beginning, Ruysch had been searching for a way to embalm body parts whose softness and fleshiness made them difficult to preserve. Much time and effort had gone into developing an effective method of preparation: ‘It seemed to me that I had found a good and suitable method, but I soon discovered I’d been deceived; then I struck out on an entirely different path, which proved no less misleading, and thus I spent many years . . . until finally I succeeded in preserving from decay for many centuries—and possibly for ever, I believe—not only the fleshy parts and the brain, but even whole human beings with all their internal organs.’2 Perfection Preparing a specimen required the injection of a fluid that solidified only after it had penetrated the tiniest of vessels. Ruysch started out using liquid wax. It was a step in the right direction, but he continued to search for a more suitable substance. He also experimented with various techniques intended to increase the permeability of the tissues. One of them involved spending hours on end pouring warm water over the parts being prepared for injection. The main improvement, however, was Ruysch’s new injection fluid—possibly suggested to him by his son—which produced astonishing results. Finally able to fill even the thinnest of vessels, he delighted in his subsequent discoveries,

1

AW (Frederik Ruysch, Alle de Werken) 659. See also AW 802. Foreword to the Eerste anatomische cabinet. In 1705 Ruysch made a remark about a brain he had prepared in 1669, thinking that people should be amazed ‘that the brain, being of a very soft substance, can be made as hard as rock by my fluid’. It also made them shine. Such a preparation was imperishable. Ruysch thought ‘that those who come after me will be able, I trust, to keep it for a thousand years and more without decomposing, considering that things prepared in this way are not subject to decay’ (AW 705). 2

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and described in lyrical terms ‘all those arterial vessels fanning out into the internal organs and going straight into the veins!’3 It was, he said, as though the smallest parts of the body, visible at last, were saying to him: ‘You’ve been spouting falsehoods about us for long enough. Now that you have the opportunity to see us from both front and back, and top and bottom, tell the world who and what we are.’4 With his new fluid Ruysch could make preparations that differed little in appearance from living tissue. He kept most of his specimens in glass jars and bottles, in a remarkably clear liquid called liquor balsamicus that preserved their lifelike colour and elasticity. This was the most significant advancement over his earlier method of preservation, which admittedly made ‘the objects as hard as stone and imperishable, but changed them a great deal in colour and shape’.5 By this time his early preparations had aged, but they, too, had been revolutionary in their day. Now, however, Ruysch could ‘restore a dead person to a natural-looking state, as though he were alive . . . One sees that almost nothing is missing but the soul; the limbs are supple; the skin, flesh, fat and even the internal organs look natural, and some are as red as in a living person.’6 It had taken Ruysch thirty-four years to perfect his new method. ‘I shall not easily forget the effort it required’, sighed Ruysch, who did not want people to think he had simply stumbled upon his technique. On the contrary, he had risen every day at 4 a.m. to work on it, and had spent as much as he could afford on the necessary materials. Often he had been close to despair. He claimed to have dissected more than a thousand bodies, many in an advanced state of decomposition. Frequently his cadavers were infested with worms, exposing him to dangerous diseases.7 He performed small miracles with his corpses: ‘The bodies brought to me in a filthy and sometimes very fetid condition were transformed by my art into persons who seemed merely asleep.’8 All they lacked was movement. Moreover, his prepared corpses no longer stank: ‘The dead bodies I have prepared fill one’s nostrils with a fragrant smell.’ The internal organs, which normally ‘decay and rot

3 4 5 6 7 8

AW 1214. AW 1095. AW 592. AW 1094. Radziun, Anatomische collectie, 51–52. AW 372.

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very easily’, were ‘undeteriorated, perfect and very pleasing to the eye’, and could even withstand the summer heat. Ruysch had thought up a use for such preserved organs: instead of following the custom of the English upper classes, who honoured the memory of dead women by making rings from plaited locks of their hair, it would be much better to embalm their hearts and keep them in gold or silver boxes, ‘to their eternal memory and the flourishing of my art’. He maintained that hearts embalmed according to his method could be kept for hundreds of years, remaining ‘vivid in colour and pleasant-smelling, without the least decay’, and insisted that this held true for all the internal organs: ‘This is why I do not need to remove the heart, brain and other organs when I start to embalm the body, as a result of which this method far surpasses those of others, who are compelled to remove the internal organs and bury them separately.’9 When Ruysch first made his results public, his technique was considered akin to sorcery. Visitors to his museum and those attending his lessons never failed to express their wonder and amazement. This pleased Ruysch, who exploited to the full the sensational aspects of his preparations and was keenly aware of their impact. Like his audience, he was enchanted with embalmed corpses that seemed merely to be asleep. His favourite specimen was the embalmed body of an eightyear-old boy, which he decked out in finery whenever he put it on display. This work of art even inspired Jan Pluimer, the director of the theatre, to write a verse: When he passed away was this dear boy just eight years old? How could his corpse be thus preserved for thirteen years all told? This art belongs to Ruysch alone, who’s able, as you see, To lend himself and this dead body immortality.10

A Jesuit priest who had come from the East Indies composed Latin verses in honour of the embalmed children he had seen in Ruysch’s collection.11 A well-travelled physician from Lübeck said that he had not encountered such embalming skills in Germany, France or Spain.12 Not everyone was equally enthusiastic, however, and some people

9

AW 623. See also AW 711. AW 723. 11 AW 659. See the second page of Ruysch’s guestbook (Amsterdam University Library, MS I E 20). 12 AW 267. 10

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simply refused to believe their eyes. Ruysch was accused of using trickery to make his preparations more attractive. He protested his innocence, however, assuring his detractors that he had not used cosmetics or paint or any other artifice to spruce up his corpses. Still, he had no intention of revealing what he had done, and thought it only reasonable to want to protect himself from those who ‘prefer to dress in borrowed plumes like the crow of Aesopus’.13 He was prepared to say only that his injection fluid was ‘wax-like’. Many people wondered what all the fuss was about. ‘Vessels, small vessels, even smaller vessels, tiny vessels, minuscule vessels and so on. Injections that go from narrow to narrower to invisible narrowness’, wrote an irritated spectator, ‘O anatomical wonders! Nowadays they cause more of an uproar than any other study.’ They made one famous ‘among ignorant folk amazed by such things’. But even though the body parts had been beautified by the art of ‘injecting, filling and buffing’, the corpses were still as dead as doornails.14 Ruysch continued to be criticized for the way he presented his anatomical material. What was the point of all that embellishment, Ruysch was asked, and he countered by demanding to know why people spent so much money burying bodies that were already wormeaten. Ruysch’s own reasons were clear: ‘First of all, I do it to allay the distaste of people who are naturally inclined to be dismayed by the sight of corpses . . . Secondly, I do it to preserve the honour and dignity of the soul once housed in the body.’15 Ruysch saw a clear connection between the appearance of his preparations and their scientific validity, for he claimed the ability to restore a body to the state it was in before death. That his corpses seemed to be asleep was not just amazing, it was significant. Ruysch’s prepared organs looked as they did in living people, ‘since those vessels, which during life are filled with fluids, and after death drained of them . . . I fill again by means of my art’.16 The perfection of his method was important not only to the aspect and ‘shelf life’ of his preparations, but ultimately, and most importantly, to those studying the structure of human tissue, who sought to examine vessels so fine they could be seen only under a very strong microscope on a sunny day. Ruysch was capable of such delicate injec13 14 15 16

AW 241. Medicus politicus, 80–82. AW 1100. AW 1220, 1223.

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tions because he now had a fluid with which he could fill up the vessels further than the capillaries, to the point where they became as fine as cobwebs. The art consisted in the ability to inject a fluid that was thin enough to penetrate to the smallest branchings of the capillaries, but which subsequently solidified to render the preparation permanent. Furthermore, the injection had to be done with just the right amount of force: hard enough to make the fluid penetrate deep into the vessels, but not so hard as to cause any artificial openings. Finally, the blood vessels had to be painstakingly ‘freed from everything that hinders our observation’.17 Ruysch was convinced that his new technique would lead to greater knowledge of organ structure. His art shed light on hitherto unsolvable problems. Without his injections the smallest vessels remained transparent and therefore invisible. His preparation method, however, made it possible to see vessels that could not be seen even in a freshly dead body. Once, at the bedside of a dying patient, he had pondered the probability that what he saw in a corpse was not the same as what he observed in a living organism: ‘I saw the bloom of the face fading with each passing hour, and it occurred to me that the man’s internal organs and other parts would lose their natural appearance in the same way.’18 Now, however, his new method of preparation allowed him to confirm that thousands of tiny body parts became invisible after death. Ruysch had every confidence that his highly idiosyncratic manner of preservation and presentation represented a significant advancement. He regretted that he had not mastered the art in his younger days, for until the breakthrough in his technique, he had been prevented from exploiting his dissections to the full, and had been forced—like all dissectionists—to make do with a limited knowledge of organ structure. Reinier de Graaf, for example, had made an illustration of the pancreas, ‘so natural that it cannot be improved upon, even though there is not much to be seen of the blood vessels’,19 which became visible only when they were injected with Ruysch’s new substance. He could now demonstrate the real structure of the liver, since he could prepare the organ without boiling it or stripping off

17 18 19

AW 536. AW 1095, 1136. AW 1098.

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the outer membrane. True insights could not be gained by using the old methods: ‘Thus our predecessors in anatomy have told us tall tales about many things, which we now discover to be otherwise.’20 Those who remained faithful to Galen still thought that some parts of the body had no blood supply, but Ruysch demonstrated the opposite. In 1697 he even succeeded in injecting his coloured fluid into the tiniest blood vessels of the periosteum of the ossicles. Without his technique, Ruysch said, one could never have seen the tips of the vessels: ‘Now we see that the ends of most of them are as thin as down or a spider’s web; others end in what seems to be pulp, and I can show that pulp to be vascular, too, in many places.’21 Ruysch knew for certain that ‘the Ancients, if they had had precise knowledge of the extreme ends of the vessels, would not have clung to so many fallacies regarding the workings of the human body’.22 Since the beginning of anatomical research on human bodies, the parts visible to the eye had all been described and depicted. The microscope had enlarged the eye’s possibilities somewhat, but Ruysch was certain that his method, which he considered better than all others, would lead to a more precise description of the human body. Even with the microscope, one could not see the smallest vessels so clearly, let alone demonstrate their presence to others. His art had made them not just visible, but tangible.23 Ruysch’s new method allowed him to augment existing descriptions of the human body and also gave him more precise knowledge of its workings. He was particularly delighted to discover how the arteries entered the internal organs, because it prompted him to reconsider the functioning of these organs.24 The ends of the blood vessels seemed to him ‘suitable for producing one or other fluid from the nutrients in the blood’. That was a revolutionary idea. After the discovery in

20

AW 524. Giulio Casserio, a sixteenth-century anatomist, gave the first detailed description of the ossicles. He was forced to acknowledge that they were not mentioned by Galen, who had evidently been unable to see them. Casserio suggested that this was because Galen had dissected monkeys, and monkeys apparently had no ossicles. They were not shown to be covered with the periosteum until 1697, when Ruysch’s injection technique first made it possible to see this (see AW 1097). 22 AW 1058. 23 AW 1094. The point was that the blood vessels were ‘so firm and hard that they could be removed from the human body along with their branches’ (AW 251). 24 AW 1215. 21

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the mid-seventeenth century of drainage ducts at various places in the body, the Italian physician Marcello Malpighi, a pioneer of experimental research, had come to the conclusion that the processing and secretion of fluids came about in the glands, and his idea had gained general acceptance. Ruysch, too, had always subscribed to it, but the more organs he injected, the more he was convinced that the bodily fluids were produced at the extreme ends of the vessels. Rivalry Convinced that he had made a unique discovery, Ruysch felt he had an edge over other anatomists, and he was bent on maintaining it. He therefore took great pains to keep his method a secret, thinking that he was now in a position to demonstrate the true structure of the human body. Some of Ruysch’s fellow dissectionists thought him pretentious, and attempted to belittle or discredit his achievements. Ruysch generally tried to restrain his irritation at such behaviour, but he could react very fiercely indeed if he felt that he had been deprived of his due or noticed that the slurs were having an effect. He claimed authority, even more so than before, and this led to a number of clashes. Even though these run-ins were ostensibly caused by differing opinions on anatomy, they smacked of professional power politics. After all, Ruysch profited from his authority: his fame as an anatomist made him sought after as a teacher, and this put him in a position to give lucrative private lessons. Moreover, these conflicts took place against a backdrop of increasing competition between physicians and surgeons, a struggle Ruysch was caught up in, because he operated on the interface of both disciplines. In the past this had been unusual, but the time-honoured divide between scholarly medicine and hands-on surgery was now breached more and more frequently. This mutual fear of competition manifested itself after the death of Gerard Blaes, when the authorities gave the Athenaeum students permission to attend Ruysch’s anatomy lessons. Although there was little to object to in this arrangement—since they would be taught the same theoretical knowledge and acquire the same practical skills—the surgeons protested, because they feared that this new state of affairs would encroach on their territory. The guild wanted to retain the privilege of providing surgical training, to prevent physicians from annexing the profession and performing operations themselves. At

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the same time, the doctores medicinae attempted to defend their position against importunate surgeons. The vulnerability of their position had been exposed by critics such as Bontekoe, and it was questionable whether the doctors’ place in the medical hierarchy could still be justified. Thus they stressed the importance of their academic schooling, which allowed them to rise above the artisanal level of the surgeons. A surgeon with no academic background could thus be put in his place, but not a surgeon who had obtained his doctorate in medicine, and it was this category in particular that was worrisome. Ruysch now found himself in a rather awkward position within the medical profession. It was his unusual combination of knowledge and skill that had enabled him to climb to the top and to bridge the traditional gap between theory and practice. But there were more and more like him, not only increasing numbers of apothecaries and surgeons with academic degrees, but growing numbers of doctores medicinae with practical experience. Ruysch’s particular combination of knowledge and skill was no longer unique, and he was confronted with more competition than ever, just when he felt he had surpassed all his rivals. Ruysch’s first rival was Pieter Guenellon, whose star had risen rapidly. Guenellon had grown up in a surgeon’s shop, but had become so well-off that he could afford to build a luxurious canal-side house on the Herengracht. A doctor of medicine with a great deal of surgical experience, he was making an impact on the medical world. He had published an article in the Nouvelles de la République des Lettres of March 1686 about his research on fish eyes, and was planning to write ‘a mechanistic history of the human body’ in an easy-to-read style unencumbered by scientific terms, so that it could be read by his children. The work was to be divided into three parts: the first part would treat the adult body, the second would deal with reproduction, and the third would contain the most recent views on medical practice. The book would conclude with a summary of what everyone should know about preventive health care and the treatment of disease. Guenellon proposed to write this book in the language in which he could express himself most clearly: French, his mother tongue. He was convinced of the necessity of such a book: even people well-versed in various disciplines knew little about the human body, which was, after all, the best part of Creation.25

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Guenellon to Locke, 15 December 1698 (Corr. Locke VI, 524).

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Guenellon’s rise provoked opposition. In 1686, not long after his appointment as hospital physician, a pamphlet appeared that poured scorn on an unnamed doctor at the hospital who had adopted the speech and manner of a Frenchman. He was thought to apply rash and dangerous methods of treatment, and to overindulge in experimentation. Called ‘Gallo-Petrus, the French quacksalver’ and ‘the French windbag’, he was said to have made deprecatory remarks about other doctors, including Ruysch. He owed his position to his father-in-law, ‘a well-known and venerable physician of Amsterdam’.26 There was little doubt that Guenellon was the doctor in question. According to Cornelis Bontekoe, he owed his ascent to numerous recommendations, and he had had the arrogance ‘viciously to criticize a work by the good Bidloo, even before it had been published or he had ever laid eyes on it, for the purpose of knocking together a lecture in bad Latin and seeking a church and pulpit where he could deliver it’.27 Guenellon’s Cartesian sympathies led Bontekoe to expect him to join the ‘new medicine’ camp, but thanks to John Locke’s influence, Guenellon emerged as a champion of empirical practice. According to Bontekoe, he was one of those ‘who profess to their friends that medical practice is full of abuses’, but nevertheless continue to follow the ‘old path’. Bontekoe thought Guenellon too perceptive to take seriously ‘such a foolish and harmful practice as that of his father-in-law, Dr Veen’, but evidently he was prepared to subordinate his knowledge to his interests and to the respect he had for his father-in-law. Guenellon hammered home his viewpoints, constantly declaring that medicine was nothing but empiricism and lashing out at every doctor who disagreed with him. Many had been shocked to hear him call renowned physicians ‘spoilers of the profession’ and their sound ideas ‘useless theorizing’.28 Even though Guenellon had access to the dissecting room at the hospital and also gave private lessons, Ruysch and Guenellon did not get in each other’s way. To begin with, Guenellon had his own territory at the hospital and at the Admiralty, where he was in charge of the ships’ surgeons, but the main reason the two men did not clash was that Guenellon did not teach anatomy. Instead, he gave private lessons in medicine and surgery. At one of these gatherings he explained

26 27 28

Hellinga, Pamflet. Bontekoe, Reden over de koortzen. Medicus politicus, 68–69.

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to a group of young doctors and students the work done by Niels Stensen on the mechanics of muscular movement and promised to point out these things in a corpse. To this demonstration he invited a select company of regents, professors, clergymen and doctors, who gathered in the dissecting room at the hospital, where a skinned body lay ready. After his introductory speech, however, he broke off the performance, because he felt sick. He had declined to give anatomical demonstrations ever since.29 Another potential rival was Pieter Bernagie, who had started out as an apprentice-surgeon and soon became known as an ambitious young man, though at first he created more of a stir as a playwright than as a doctor. He moved widely in literary circles and was the author of various farces intended to ‘show up people’s faults and the consequences thereof’. Though Bernagie’s pieces were extremely edifying, their casual tone appealed to the public. In the short space of three years he wrote ten comedies and three tragedies, including Arminius, which he dedicated to Johannes Huydecoper. Bernagie eventually became one of the directors of the Amsterdam theatre. In early 1689, Bernagie’s pedagogical ambitions in the field of medicine were realized when the burgomasters gave him permission to give private lessons in surgery at the anatomical theatre. (Ordinary instruction in anatomy and surgery remained Ruysch’s responsibility.) Bernagie was given no salary, but evidently there was interest in his lessons, the first of which attracted a large audience, including ‘many distinguished gentlemen and doctors’. In 1691 a number of students asked the authorities for permission to attend the lessons of both Ruysch and Bernagie. There were various medical students in the city who hoped to acquire some practical experience, which was easier to do in Amsterdam than elsewhere, because of the ‘frequent medical cases’ that presented themselves in a big city. The students also hoped to profit from the lessons given in the new anatomical theatre, but they were barred by the guild officers, who maintained that there was scarcely room for the surgeons, let alone other spectators. By order of the burgomasters, a bench was installed the following year for the

29

Maar, l’Autobiographie de J.B. Winslow.

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students, who were given permission to attend the lessons given to the apprentice-surgeons.30 When Gerard Blaes died that year, Bernagie was appointed professor at the Athenaeum. This was remarkable, considering that the authorities had decided back in 1679 to economize by abolishing the professorial chair upon the death of its present holder. Guenellon reported this news to John Locke: ‘Bernagie has obtained, through his friends, the chair of medicine.’31 Bernagie was not, perhaps, the most prominent physician in Amsterdam, but he was praised for his diligence and erudition, and he obviously had good connections. In the field of surgery, he could not hope for a teaching career as long as Ruysch was the professor, but in this way a niche could be found for him after all. Like Blaes in his younger years, Bernagie gave instruction in practical medicine. He hoped, at the hospital, ‘to show concretely what can be taught in lessons only verbally’.32 As usual, the regents of the hospital did not initially welcome him; in fact, they had gone to the burgomasters with all kinds of objections, and it took until the end of the year for them to agree on a definite arrangement. Bernagie had to promise that when visiting the sick in the hospital he and his disciples would behave discreetly and make their rounds no later than 8.30 a.m. In February 1693, Guenellon reported to John Locke that Bernagie visited the hospital every day with his students in tow, to give them a taste of medical practice. Each day they visited six men and six women, and learned to make diagnoses on the basis of the symptoms they observed.33 Bernagie’s friends in the town council were apparently satisfied with his work, because after a couple of years they raised his salary to 1,000 guilders. He was able to benefit from it only for a short while, though, for he died in 1699 at the age of only forty-four.34 His position was 30 Amsterdam City Archives, surgeons’ guild archive 213. On Bernagie, see Worp, Pieter Bernagie. 31 Guenellon to Locke, 13 August 1692 (Corr. Locke IV, 491). 32 Amsterdam City Archives, hospital archives 1019, 1060. 33 Guenellon to Locke, 23 February 1693 (Corr. Locke IV, 641). 34 Epitaph by Katarina Lescaille: Here lies Bernagie, slow to quarrel, gentle-natured, kind, Ask not about the things he knew, his great accomplishments, His ignorance in any field is hard to call to mind, But he was over-burdened by excessive diligence.

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finally discontinued, and the Athenaeum ceased to be a bastion of medicine. This made little difference to Ruysch. Like Blaes, Bernagie had been involved in educating the pre-university pupils at the Athenaeum. They were not the target audience of Ruysch, whose private lessons were attended mainly by advanced students. Blaes and Bernagie, therefore, had done nothing to thwart Ruysch, but in the meantime a new rival had presented himself, this time one who was not at all willing to adapt to the existing situation. It was a foreigner by the name of Johann Jakob Rau, who in 1695 had been given permission by the authorities to make use, alongside Ruysch and Guenellon, of the dissecting room at the hospital. Rau, a burly young man of twenty-seven, was a recently qualified physician with a remarkable past. Unlike Guenellon and Bernagie, he had not grown up in Amsterdam, but was a native of Swabia, in Germany, and had been an apprentice-surgeon in Strasbourg. His family had little money, so at the age of seventeen he had travelled to Amsterdam and found work as a surgeon on a warship. After gaining several years of experience at sea and saving some money, he had gone to Leiden to study medicine, and subsequently moved to Paris, where he studied with the distinguished Joseph-Guichard Duverney, the professor of anatomy at the Jardin du Roi who had done research on the structure of the eyes and ears. Duverney was at least as famous an anatomist as Ruysch, but he owed his fame to other qualities: though competent at making preparations, he was, above all, a gifted speaker. His public lessons attracted full halls, and he had managed to make anatomy fashionable in Paris. Rau learned a great deal from him. In 1694 Rau received his doctorate in Leiden, having written a dissertation on the growth and repair of teeth. He then set up a medical practice in Amsterdam, where he performed spectacular operations, including lithotomies, and emerged as such a formidable competitor to Pieter Adriaansz and Abraham Cyprianus that the latter decided to move to England for good. Rau’s rivalry also affected Ruysch. In 1695, when Rau began to give anatomy lessons at home, he introduced himself by giving a lecture on the senses, and his lucid arguments contributed to its great success. Ruysch immediately protested, maintaining that he alone possessed the privilege of giving such lessons. The authorities consulted the Collegium Medicum, with the result that Rau was not only allowed to continue his lessons, but was also granted permission to give several demonstrations every year in the anatomical theatre. These anatomy lessons, which dealt mainly with surgical inter-

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Fig. 23 Johann Jakob Rau (1668–1719), who was described by Ruysch as very knowledgeable about bones and muscles, and an extremely adept stone-cutter.

ventions, were sometimes coupled with actual operations. In 1698 Rau made them even more accessible when he began to give them in Dutch instead of Latin. Ruysch objected to this competition, but Rau took little notice of him. A fellow surgeon by the name of Abraham Titsingh— who, like Rau, had served as a ship’s surgeon—said that Rau was not known for his sensitivity and tact in everyday dealings: ‘If he could not win a debate, he grabbed his opponent by the collar.’ But friend and foe alike agreed that Rau was an exceptionally skilled surgeon with a

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thorough understanding of anatomy, and that he gave interesting lessons that were easy to understand. That could not always be said of Ruysch, with his ponderous delivery and unsystematic approach. The same was true of his research: Ruysch worked by proceeding from a technique, not from a clearly formulated problem. This did not mean that he shrank from problem-solving, but he specialised in questions that could be answered by using his method of arterial injection, and he was often carried away by his own interests. His teaching was not universally admired, therefore, although the quality of his work was undisputed. Rau, too, had to admit that Ruysch was extremely deft at making preparations, but he thought nothing of his style, which he dismissed as ‘too showy’. Ruysch in turn thought Rau an ill-mannered lout, but nonetheless respected his achievements. Such mutual respect was entirely lacking between Ruysch and his most controversial rival, another doctor medicinae in surgeon’s scrubs, Govert Bidloo. Relations between Ruysch and Bidloo had been strained since the Lysbeth Jans affair in 1677. In the 1680s Bidloo, like Bernagie, had concentrated on attaining literary fame, but in the 1690s he re-emerged as a fierce rival of his former teacher, and this time he managed to provoke a venomous reaction from the generally affable Ruysch. King Stupidity Ruysch found it hard to stomach a braggart like Bidloo passing himself off as an authority on anatomy, but his more particular reason for bearing a grudge against the man was the fact that he had announced in public that he had long ago mastered Ruysch’s much-vaunted preparation technique. Ruysch had spent his entire life perfecting his preparation skills, and he considered himself the greatest dissectionist of his day. He did not want anyone stealing his thunder, certainly not a man like Govert Bidloo. No sooner was Bidloo in possession of his surgeon’s diploma than he started to give private lessons. The reactions were mixed: he obviously had talent, but it was generally agreed that he jumped to conclusions and overestimated his abilities. He promised more than he could deliver, and often erred in his judgement. This would not be so bad if he did not rub people the wrong way by refusing to acknowledge his mistakes. Since the pamphlet war of 1677, he had been known as the ‘spindle-shanked Vesalius’. He was much criticized, but remained a

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Fig. 24 Portrait of Govert Bidloo from his anatomical atlas, Anatomia humani corporis (Amsterdam, 1685). Engraving by Abraham Blotelingh after Gerard de Lairesse.

high-profile personality in both medical and literary spheres. As early as the 1670s, he had thrown himself into writing poetry and plays, a number of which were performed at the theatre, earning him—as always—both criticism and praise. Andries Pels had cut him down to size, but Bidloo also had admirers, one of whom was the wealthy art collector Philip de Flines, to whom he dedicated various laudatory verses.

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In 1685 Bidloo adapted Vondel’s Faëton for the stage, in a spectacular version complete with flying chariots and a huge cast to perform the additional music and ballet. Bidloo explained that his additions were meant to please the eyes and ears of the audience. Because Vondel had usually composed his plays ‘in the old Greek and Latin manner’, which no longer accorded with contemporary tastes, Bidloo had taken the liberty of adding a few ornaments. He expected his gala production to be a huge success, but instead he was severely criticized, and the public’s disapproval was voiced, as usual, in pamphlets and poems. One of his critics invoked the deceased Vondel: Vondel, look upon your heav’nly rhyme and noble thought, Ruined, re-assembled into verses meanly wrought.

One of Bidloo’s critics was his former admirer Philip de Flines, who was related to Vondel. Humiliated and bent on revenge, Bidloo planned a surprise for the New Year’s Eve performance. On that evening the audience were given an unexpected encore: before and after Jan Vos’s Medea, they were regaled with a two-act morality play by an anonymous writer. The piece was called De muiterij en nederlaag van Midas, koning Onverstand (The mutiny and defeat of Midas, King Stupidity). The play was nominally about Midas’ revolt against Apollo, but the spectators instantly recognized the characters’ true identities, because Bidloo had coached the actors until they could perfectly imitate the speech, mannerisms and gestures of the people they were spoofing. Everyone knew that Midas was De Flines, and it was abundantly clear that the characters Envy, Dispute, Windbag, Dung-fly and Needlehunter represented the members of the literary society Nil Volentibus Arduum. De Flines was ridiculed for his pretentious cultivation of plants at his country estate. It was not immediately clear who the author was, but the play was the talk of the town. One of those made to look preposterous, the lawyer Herman Amya (for whom Bidloo had written a nuptial poem just two years before), summoned two witnesses on 2 January to make a sworn statement regarding what they had seen on New Year’s Eve. The witnesses declared that in the second act various well-known persons (not only Amya, but also Philip de Flines and Romein de Hooghe) had been ‘shamefully criticized and made a spectacle of’ by mocking their ‘clothing, gestures, appearance and everyday mannerisms of speech’. The witnesses declared that they had heard people at the theatre and in coffeehouses utter the names of these persons: ‘That was Amya (whom

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they portrayed with that red face) . . . that was Lingelbag, that was De Flines.’ The piece was performed again the next day, and the offended lawyer would not rest until he discovered who had written it. It took some time, but at last he persuaded Ludolf Smids, another playwright, to reveal the author’s name. Amya took advantage of the quarrel between Bidloo and Smids, who had been on friendly terms at the time of the performance but had subsequently fallen out. Smids declared that in November and December, Bidloo had read aloud to him ‘at his home, on various occasions, a certain pasquil called the Struggle between Apollo and Midas, King Stupidity’, which Bidloo had said was intended as a public put-down of several gentlemen, among them De Flines. Smids confirmed that he had witnessed the actors rehearsing the play and Bidloo coaching them. Bidloo had derided Philip de Flines’s ‘pursuit of herbalism’ and had presented De Hooghe as a pedantic critic and mocked his ‘pastime of drawing flowerbeds’. Romein de Hooghe, a lawyer, was known chiefly as an etcher who had illustrated works by Constantijn Huygens and Hugo Grotius, as well as Nicolaas Witsen’s book on shipbuilding and a grandiloquent poem—De Gemartelde Apostelen (The Martyred Apostles)—published in 1675 by Govert Bidloo himself. But evidently Bidloo had a score to settle with De Hooghe, for he wrote another piece ridiculing the same gentlemen, and this time King Midas and his general were captured during an insurrection. Bidloo intended to stage it by having Midas—‘representing Mr Philip de Flines, viciously portrayed’—enter on a live donkey, sitting on it backwards and holding its tail in his hand.35 Bidloo had been called to account by the burgomasters, but had nevertheless been able to continue his literary career, becoming in 1686 director of the theatre, together with Jan Pluimer and Pieter de la Croix. In that capacity he was fiercely attacked: the pamphlet De klaagende schouwburg (The complaining theatre) maintained that the theatre was being disgraced by ‘farce after farce’. Bidloo, with his ‘wild expression and hollow, sunken cheeks’, was described as ‘a hawk with a well-honed beak and claw’, a man who often ‘betrayed his God and his friend’, ‘a scoundrel’ who was ‘as wayward as the wind’. He was

35 Amsterdam City Archives, notary Andreas du Moulin, April 1687. See Minderaa, Marsyas.

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exposed as someone who propagated good morals on stage, but had meanwhile turned his home into a brothel. ‘You have abandoned your doctorship to fill your skinny throat with my profits’, concluded the pamphlet.36 That situation would soon change, however, for in 1688 Govert Bidloo became a colleague of Ruysch. As the successor to Anthony Nuck, who had gone to Leiden, Bidloo was appointed professor of anatomy and surgery in The Hague. That he was even a candidate for such a position was due to the publication in 1685 of his long-awaited anatomical atlas. For years he had proudly shown everyone Gerard de Lairesse’s drawings. Following an old tradition, De Lairesse had drawn a skeleton climbing out of a grave, but otherwise mainly muscle-bound nudes and anatomized bodies. In contrast to Ruysch—who avoided any allusion to blood and gore in both his illustrations and his museum displays—De Lairesse had depicted the actual dissection in a ‘modern’ naturalistic manner. Thus he had drawn not only the parts of the body described by Bidloo, but also the opened corpse, the instruments used in its dissection, and the surrounding skin and fat. On one preparation he had playfully drawn a fly. The drawings were greatly admired, but they contained anatomical errors, and there were discrepancies between the illustrations and the text. The reviewers reproached Bidloo for not pointing out to De Lairesse the parts not immediately visible, and for not checking the drawings carefully. It was said that Bidloo’s texts were superficial and lacked references to the literature. Although he had dealt thoroughly with the subjects he knew the most about (the eyes, the genitals and especially the female breasts), he had not adequately discussed topics of less interest to him. This was true, for example, of the vascular system, Ruysch’s specialization. Upon seeing a drawing of the arterial system of a six-month-old baby, Ruysch remarked: ‘Bidloo claims to have kept this preparation. I should like to see it, because the drawing contains so many implausibilities that we can assign it to the realm of fantasy.’37 Despite Gerard de Lairesse’s admirable illustrations, very few copies of Bidloo’s atlas were sold. In 1689 a Dutch version appeared on the market, but to no avail: for lay people, the edition was too expensive; for anatomists, the scholarship was substandard. The Dutch version

36 37

Nederduitsche Keurdigten, 567–575. See Vasbinder, Govard Bidloo, 33.

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had been supplied, by way of introduction, with the text of the inaugural lecture Bidloo had given upon accepting the chair in The Hague. The lecture was titled Inleijding tot de ontledingskunst (Introduction to anatomy), but it contained no more than a short history of anatomy. According to Bidloo, the art of dissection had been held in high regard by the Greeks, but after that, much knowledge had been lost owing to migration and ecclesiastical interdicts. Vesalius, however, had restored anatomical learning to its former glory. Otherwise Bidloo’s text was given over to singing the praises of anatomy. He asserted, for instance, that those who travelled around the world encountered fewer marvels than those who practised anatomy. He named such luminaries as Harvey, Bartholin, Stensen, Malpighi, Van Horne, Duverney and the Utrecht professor Jacob Vallan; the teachers he thanked in the foreword included Van Dortmond, Slade, and Allard and Abraham Cyprianus. He took great care not to mention Frederik Ruysch. Bidloo’s atlas had betrayed his tendency to churn out texts in slipshod fashion, but he could also take his work very seriously indeed. The Haarlem surgeon Wouter Schouten, a relative of Ruysch, recounted an incident that occurred shortly after Bidloo had been appointed in The Hague. Schouten and several other surgeons were consulted in Haarlem by a woman with a ‘bad breast’ full of lumps. She had gone to The Hague to consult Bidloo, who had advised a mastectomy. It was known that his advice was not always to be trusted, but in this case the Haarlem doctors concurred with him. It was agreed that Bidloo would operate. On the appointed day there was a blizzard, but Bidloo showed up as promised and Schouten had to admit that he performed the operation very skilfully indeed.38 In The Hague, Bidloo succeeded in winning the confidence of Stadholder Willem III. He had once written an ode to Johan de Witt and a verse in which he ridiculed the stadholder, but now he began an ode to Willem III, together with Romein de Hooghe, of all people—the man he had mocked at the Amsterdam theatre. Even though he was praised for his ‘great ingenuity and inventions’, De Hooghe had been forced to leave Amsterdam ‘because of his annoying behaviour and his authorship of caustic pasquils and lewd and shameful prints’.39 In The Hague, Bidloo and De Hooghe collaborated harmoniously on a

38 39

Tegennatuurlijke gezwellen, 536. According to Arnold Houbraken, Groote Schouburgh III, 202–203.

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Fig. 25 Engraving after a drawing by Gerard de Lairesse from Anatomia humani corporis, Bidloo’s anatomical atlas. Why, Ruysch asked Bidloo, are the genitalia depicted here so lewdly, at a place in the text where they are not even discussed?

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publication devoted to the crowning of Willem III as King of England. When Willem III returned to the Netherlands in the winter of 1691, he was welcomed in The Hague with a splendid triumphal arch, decorated in part by Bidloo and De Hooghe. Bidloo delivered a eulogy in Latin. One critic wrote grudgingly about the praise Bidloo had received for the triumphal arch, on which ‘the beard-cutter and would-be orator G. Bidloo had painted nothing but a few frills and some dog-Latin’.40 In The Hague, too, Govert Bidloo remained a controversial figure. Together with Romein de Hooghe and others, he published various anonymous pasquils ridiculing well-known people. One of these lampoons was nearly his undoing. In the spring of 1692, when the Hague lawyers protested against the measures taken by the High Council to curb the fees charged by solicitors and barristers, Bidloo published, anonymously, a pamphlet in which he mocked the lawyers’ protests, saying that those gentlemen apparently thought their clients should foot the bill for their sumptuous lifestyles. He also criticized in passing (though under a pseudonym) various prominent people, some of whom took offence. The pamphlet caused an uproar, and the Court of Holland opened an investigation into the matter, which led them to the bookseller who had published Bidloo’s pamphlets. The Court of Holland decided to have Bidloo arrested, but he pleaded indisposition and was allowed to remain at home under guard. The very next day Willem III wrote from Loo Castle, demanding that the case against Bidloo be dropped and all relevant documents sent to him. A month later Willem III came up with a plan to grant Bidloo diplomatic immunity, alleging that for the past two years he had served as secretary to the English ambassador. The members of the Court— headed by the public prosecutor, Johan Ruysch, a relative of Frederik Ruysch—grumbled, claiming that Bidloo fell under their jurisdiction, since he did not live in the embassy. Nevertheless, the guard was removed from Bidloo’s house, after he assured them he would not try to leave. Willem III then claimed him as his army doctor for the coming campaign, whereupon Bidloo left The Hague and joined his protector. Willem III immediately appointed him chief supervisor of all the army hospitals in the Netherlands, and left with his troops for Flanders.41

40 41

Nederduitsche Keurdigten, 239–240. Knuttel, Govert Bidloo. See Huygens Jr, Journaal II, 56: 13 May 1692.

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Public prosecutor Ruysch complained that Bidloo had not kept his word, but the bird had flown the coop. After the campaign, Willem III ordered the chief magistrate of The Hague to submit a petition for clemency, which he instantly granted. In the end Bidloo had to pay only 169 guilders in legal costs. In any case, he soon left The Hague and moved to Leiden, where royal pressure had secured him a chair at the university, as successor to the recently deceased Anthony Nuck. After only six months, Bidloo’s annual salary was raised from 1,000 to 1,600 guilders. Bidloo’s appointment prompted one of his many former friends, Laurens Bake—who had even contributed a laudatory poem to the Dutch version of Bidloo’s anatomical atlas—to lash out at him with this sarcastic verse: The great Professor Opportunist (so the story goes) The art of anatomization and this trick he knows As well as the Triumphal Arch. He opens up his doors To one and all, alone or married, gentlemen or whores. And if you catch a dread disease you still need not demur, For if you offer money, he will not withhold the cure.42

Discrediting Rivals Frederik Ruysch could not bear the fact that Bidloo had been given a chair at Leiden. The year after his rival’s appointment he launched a project intended primarily to publicize his own anatomical discoveries, but which also provided, as an added bonus, an opportunity to damage Bidloo’s reputation. It was called Epistolae anatomicae. Ruysch had resolved to publish his findings in epistolary form. This collection of letters propagated a number of views that would be debated for years in the European medical world: his assertion, in particular, that tissue consisted entirely of vessels, and his notion of the limited importance of glands. His choice of the epistolary form was no coincidence: reading the relevant literature had never been his forte, so he left this work to his correspondent—generally someone who had attended his classes. Ruysch was then free to pursue the topic broached in the letter without researching the literature himself. Taking this tack also enabled him to pre-empt criticism of his lack of 42

Nederduitsche Keurdigten, 421.

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reading. Censure of Bidloo was a leitmotiv of these letters. The author of nearly every letter written to Ruysch had found mistakes in Bidloo’s writings, which Ruysch was happy to rectify in his reply, to which he added drawings correcting the errors in Bidloo’s illustrations. In the autumn of 1695, Ruysch demonstrated during a dissection that Bidloo’s illustrations of the arteries around the heart were incorrect. In Bidloo’s atlas the aorta was pictured with separate ascending and descending branches, but it could be found like that only in animals, according to Ruysch, whose new method of preparation enabled him to see that the aorta in humans was different. Johann Gaub, a student from Heidelberg, was willing to treat this subject in a letter, to which Ruysch replied that he was amazed that Professor Bidloo had not seen the aorta clearly, since he had announced in public that he had known Ruysch’s method of preparing and preserving bodies even before Ruysch had discovered it. But previous anatomical drawings, such as those in Bidloo’s atlas, testified to the truth of Ruysch’s words: ‘My art has been a secret until now.’43 Ruysch took advantage of a subsequent opportunity to damage Bidloo’s reputation in his reply to a letter written by Gerhard Frentz, a doctor from Lübeck, who had studied in Leiden and come to Amsterdam to visit Ruysch and see his museum. This time he informed his readers that Bidloo had commissioned drawings of roots at the base of the gall bladder, not because he had seen them, but because he had adopted them from the English anatomist Nathaniel Highmore. In fact, there were no such roots, only small branches of blood vessels.44 The next topic was introduced by Johannes Campdomerc, one of Ruysch’s devoted private pupils, who began by praising his teacher’s kindness towards everyone, professional and amateur alike, who wished to study anatomy or medicine. Indeed, Ruysch had treated him like a son, and he went on to say that his teacher had shown him things in the spleen that were not to be found in the literature. The literature, moreover, contained mistakes, no doubt because some parts of the body were difficult to see, but also because dissectionists based their conclusions on the anatomy of animals. Campdomerc had expected to see glands in the spleen, such as those illustrated in Bidloo’s atlas, but the human spleen contained no glands whatsoever.

43 44

AW 247–255. AW 267–276.

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Ruysch explained that Bidloo had made the same mistake as DeleBoë, who had assumed that what he observed in a calf’s spleen was also to be found in the human spleen, without checking the validity of his assumption. Bidloo’s atlas thus contained an illustration showing part of a calf’s spleen—inflated, dried, and cut open to show a crosssection. The manner of preparation he described—flushing it out with water—was suitable for a calf’s spleen, but a human spleen could not be treated in this way. The membrane covering the spleen was thick and tough in a calf, but in a human so fragile that Bidloo’s treatment would cause it to tear. Ruysch said that he had made an important discovery in the spleen, namely that what had previously been assumed to be glands were not in fact such. He confessed that he had also made this mistake when using his old method, but his new technique had allowed him to see minute branchings at the ends of the blood vessels. To be sure, they resembled glands, because the branches were ‘arranged in bundles, resulting in round bodies that were very soft and spongy’. They were not glands, however, because they were not surrounded by a membrane and were not separate entities. Ruysch concluded that ‘the entire constitution of the human spleen was nothing but a combination of arteries, veins, lymph vessels and nerves, held together by the surrounding membranes’. Ruysch thus published his theory that tissue consisted entirely of a network of increasingly delicate vessels. Galen had assumed that various organs had no blood supply, but Ruysch had been able to prove that blood was present everywhere in the body. He even went so far as to maintain that organ tissue consisted entirely of vessels. He denied the existence of a substance between the vessels, the substance traditionally called parenchyma. According to Ruysch, the organs consisted of blood vessels in various arrangements, and this theory contradicted the established notion formulated by Malpighi that they were composed of glands.45 Ruysch did not deny that tissue contained glands, but he maintained that they, too, consisted largely of blood vessels. There could be no doubt that Ruysch’s new insights were the result of his improved preparation technique, which he had developed by building upon and further refining the discoveries of Reinier de Graaf

45

AW 256–266. See also AW 251–252, 723.

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and Jan Swammerdam: ‘After me, there were several of my disciples, including Professor Bidloo, who imitated it.’ Ruysch continued to advertise, quite literally, the avenues of inquiry opened up by his art of preparation. On 29 May 1696 he announced in the Amsterdamsche Courant that he intended ‘to launch a series of public anatomy lessons in the hottest summer months, showing bodies that still seemed alive but had been dead for two years’. Until this time it had been impossible to hold an anatomical demonstration in the summer, but Ruysch now proposed using preparations to show the delicate vascular structures he had discovered.46 Some critics thought it a lamentable break with tradition, but Ruysch defended his decision, pointing out that, in contrast to body parts in ‘fresh’ corpses, prepared body parts retained their natural shape.47 To placate those critics who accused him of chicanery, he showed at one of his public anatomy lessons children’s corpses on which he had used no cosmetics whatsoever. At a spectator’s request he rubbed the face of one of his preserved corpses with sand, salt, soap, water and a cloth, ‘until the skin almost came off ’. With Bidloo and Rau in hot pursuit, Ruysch did his utmost to make his public demonstrations appealing. When he and his son Hendrik cut open the body of a woman and found teeth in a tumour in one of her ovaries, he decided to open only one side of the ovary, keeping it intact until he could present it at a public demonstration. At the first available opportunity he told the audience the whole story and produced the teeth for their inspection.48 No matter how hard Ruysch tried, however, there were those who remained unimpressed by his performances. One bored spectator imitated his enthusiastic praise of his own discoveries—‘Look, here’s something you’ve never seen before, at least not before I discovered it; oh, just look at those intertwined vessels’—and said it was not as though one had been unaware, before Ruysch came along, that vessels branch off into ever smaller vessels. Because Ruysch worked with preparations, his audience was no longer driven away by the smell, but according to this critic, their interest flagged so much after five or six days that he had to end his demonstration anyway.49 46 47 48 49

AW 660. AW 710. AW 513–514. Medicus politicus, 115.

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Ruysch continued to announce his discoveries by means of published correspondence. His German pupil Johann Heinrich Grätz, a native of Dessau who had studied in Anhalt, was allowed not only to attend Ruysch’s demonstrations but also to carry out dissections himself. As a token of his gratitude, he wrote a letter in which he related that certain persons disputed Ruysch’s discovery of the pulmonary artery. Several ‘nitpicking’ critics had pointed out Erasistratus’ mention of that artery in ancient times, and the fact that Pietro de Marchetti, a doctor at the University of Padua, had apparently described just such an artery forty years earlier. Grätz now argued that those previous descriptions were vague, whereas Ruysch’s was crystal clear. In his reply to Grätz, Ruysch—who began by accusing some people of spending more time on polemics than on research—said he did not know the work of De Marchetti, and reasserted his claim to the discovery. He appended an illustration of the pulmonary artery of a child and apologized for the fact that it was smaller in a child (and thus more difficult to discern), but that no adult corpse had been available. Grätz wrote another letter, in which he expressed his surprise at not finding anything in the literature about the ‘thin cerebral membrane’ (pia mater): ‘Nor have I been able to find anything in Mr Bidloo’s anatomical plates (in which many search in vain for what is promised) that hasn’t been said repeatedly by others.’ Ruysch sent him, and by extension the entire scientific community, an illustration of the membrane.50 On more than one occasion Bidloo had reacted angrily to Ruysch’s criticism by dismissing his rival as a sophisticated butcher. Gradually, however, he was forced to defend himself in writing, and since he was unable to parry the substance of Ruysch’s objections, he took another tack and simply belittled his opponent. To cut Ruysch to the quick, he declared during one of his classes that research into blood vessels and the precise nature of the circulatory system was meaningless and unnecessary, since by now it was obvious that every part of the body was nourished by blood. He composed a poem titled ‘To N.N.’, but the addressee was never in doubt. 50

AW 277–294. Ruysch preserved part of an injected pia mater, and wrote ‘that there is scarcely anything more difficult than separating this aforementioned membrane from the cortex-like substance of the brain, spreading it out and drying it thus, just as I have done here’. See AW 614.

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You are labelled erudite, but I should like to bargain That none, however wise or learned, understands your jargon, Much less its sense, upon which one must have the luck to stumble. Speak clearly in the Greek and Latin that you always mumble, And show the world you understand what you pass off as learning, For then you’d have more right to the renown for which you’re yearning. But if you ramble and remain as stubborn as before, None will deign to read your writings, now or ever more.51

Undaunted, Ruysch continued to publish his epistolary treatises, including his correspondence with Dr Bartholomeus Keerwolf, a physician in Leiden, to whom he had shown various prepared hearts. Keerwolf wrote that Ruysch’s preparations contradicted what the literature (and Bidloo) had to say about it. Ruysch replied that the heart had never before been depicted correctly, because of its state after death. When removed from the body, a heart was flaccid. Moreover, anatomists often had recourse to animal hearts, usually those of sheep or calves. A human heart could not be depicted correctly until it had been restored to its natural state.52 An afternoon session of one of Ruysch’s next public anatomy lessons was attended by Govert Bidloo’s brother, Lambert Bidloo, who saw Ruysch handling cutaneous glands and heard him say that those glands, as the audience could see, were round and not needle-shaped, as they appeared in Professor Bidloo’s atlas. The next day Govert Bidloo himself appeared at the anatomical theatre, having come all the way from Leiden to attend the demonstration. Ruysch took up the gauntlet, repeating what he had said the day before, whereupon Bidloo became ‘swollen with rage’. He then proceeded to discuss the cerebral membranes, saying that the so-called ‘spider-web membrane’ had been discovered in 1665–1666 by the research group whose members included Matthew Slade, Jan Swammerdam and Abraham Quina (who was in the audience), and that he found it despicable that someone else had attempted to claim the discovery. He then showed Bidloo the membrane and asked him to ponder its extreme thinness, adding that he thought it highly unlikely that anyone could isolate it and show it to the scientific community—certainly not interwoven, as Bidloo had claimed, with visible blood vessels. Ruysch, in any case, could find no blood vessels in it, but—he impressed upon his audience—a ‘certain

51 52

AW 298; Bidloo, Mengelpoëzy, 264. AW 318–324.

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rash individual’ had depicted the membrane separately and with blood vessels, in the mistaken belief that every part of the body was fed by blood vessels. Most of the audience knew that Ruysch was referring to Bidloo, to whom all eyes now turned, but Bidloo just sat there, silent, until almost everyone had left. When only the scholars in the first row remained, he made a move to leave. Latin had been spoken until then, but Bidloo now said in Dutch, ‘Sir, I thank you, and I shall gladly return the courtesy when you next come to Leiden.’ Ruysch said, ‘The occasion might easily present itself’, whereupon Bidloo replied, ‘I shall notify you of any demonstrations I give.’ ‘As you wish’, Ruysch said. This exchange of words took place in a cool, polite manner, but according to Bidloo, Ruysch had spoken in a quavering voice. Ruysch maintained that this was because he was ‘not so impudent as Bidloo’. He admitted that he found confrontations exhausting, and that losing a debate always upset him, but evidently Bidloo was not bothered by it: ‘Our undaunted friend is not afraid to lose an argument’, he concluded.53 Bidloo continued to cross Ruysch wherever possible. In late January 1697, when he heard that a soldier and a sailor had been condemned to death in Amsterdam, he reminded Amsterdam’s sheriff and magistrates of the 1681 ruling that the corpses of all criminals executed in the province of Holland should be handed over to the University of Leiden. Under his predecessor, that regulation had never been enforced, but Bidloo now demanded that the corpses be brought to Leiden. The authorities denied his request, protesting that they had not yet decided what was to be done with the bodies, though it was likely they would remain on the gallows as a deterrent. It was with good reason, they said, that Amsterdam had been granted the privilege of instituting a Collegium Anatomicum in 1555. Bidloo lodged a complaint with the university governors and the Leiden burgomasters, and insisted that there be no repetition of this outrage. Two months later, when the twenty-three-year-old sailor Ferdinand Jansz and another criminal were found guilty of repeated theft and condemned to death in Amsterdam, two Leiden regents—delegates to the States General in The Hague—called the Amsterdam delegates to account, requesting that one of the bodies be handed over to Bidloo. The delegates wrote to the Amsterdam authorities, and were duly

53

AW 453–454.

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informed that their request had arrived too late. Nor was the request honoured when the executions were postponed to the next day. No executioner was available in Amsterdam, so Ferdinand Jansz was hanged on Sunday instead of Saturday, and from Monday to Friday Frederik Ruysch used his body for a public dissection. The following week Ruysch received a letter from Leiden, written by Andreas Ottomar Gölicke, a physician from Anhalt who had received his doctorate at the recently founded university in Halle. Gölicke told Ruysch that he had noticed mistakes in Bidloo’s depiction of the pia mater: ‘At first I could not believe this from a man so renowned in anatomy, who prides himself on his skill and success at dissection.’ Gölicke, who had meanwhile seen through Bidloo, told Ruysch that Bidloo did not hesitate to use his classes as a platform for slandering his rival. Such letters were slightly suspect, because their authors could very well be trying to focus attention on themselves, but Ruysch replied anyway, saying that he had already heard about Bidloo’s insults but had decided not to react: ‘Let him rail against me, as he has done to others, for he is not worthy of my wrath . . . Calling me names will neither enhance his own reputation nor tarnish mine . . . I should rather be called an inept dissectionist than a notorious whoremonger.’54 That last remark was an allusion to Bidloo’s bawdy behaviour, referred to repeatedly in pamphlets and satirical poems. Bidloo’s former comrade Laurens Bake, for example, devoted some splendid verses to his dramatic works: Do you ask who Wildsong is, or King Stupidity, Here portrayed from life with very little finery? It is Midas Bidloo, scourge of youth, as all can see. Would you enjoy an opera full of feasts and drunken revel, With Bacchanalian orgies and temptations of the devil? At Bidloo’s house you see the very best, and true to life, For he himself plays Bacchus’ part—and Venus? his good wife!55

Bake called Bidloo a drunkard and a pimp, who had turned his house into a brothel and then raked in money curing his visitors’ venereal diseases. In a poem marking Bidloo’s appointment as professor at

54 55

AW 307–317. Nederduitsche Keurdigten, 565.

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Leiden, Bake left no room for doubt that Bidloo owed his position to Willem III: Now that this mere harlot-keeper thinks himself above his peers, It is neither God nor Satan but his death that he most fears.

Malice Aforethought Meanwhile Bidloo found himself in difficulty in Leiden, where Willem III had appointed him rector magnificus. Bidloo contributed so little to actual instruction that his students were leaving in droves and he had been formally reprimanded by the university governors. In his published correspondence with Gölicke, Ruysch boasted that he had always kept his promises, whereas others, who aspired to professorships, ‘promise mountains of gold, and claim that not even all the hospitals together will be able to supply the bodies needed for their anatomical studies’, only to renege on their promises and disappoint their students. Ruysch disapprovingly pointed out that some professors did not give their first public anatomy lessons until three years after their appointment. Bidloo now felt sufficiently provoked to give a direct answer in book form: Vindiciae contra ineptas animadversiones F. Ruyschii. In the introduction he stated that he would defend himself against the dictatorship Ruysch sought to exercise in the respublica anatomica, and proceeded to examine the criticism Ruysch had voiced in his published correspondence. Countering the criticism of his depictions, whose mistakes Ruysch always rectified by supplying a drawing of one of his preparations, Bidloo argued that he had drawn them as they appear naturally, not as they look after undergoing Ruysch’s artful treatment. Bidloo considered the nervous system more important than the circulatory system, and said that Ruysch’s attempts to follow the smallest branchings of the blood vessels testified to his lack of anatomical insight. He ridiculed Ruysch’s preparations, alleging that they had been treated with red lead, white lead and scarlet paint. He maintained that their preservation was the result of spiritus balsamicus, and that the specimens and all their embellishments would perish if exposed to air. With regard to his own depiction of the aorta, he argued that Ruysch himself had said that the arterial system could vary slightly from person to person, and Rau had recently demonstrated this. Asserting that it was impossible to prepare arteries as Ruysch had

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shown them, and that Ruysch was therefore guilty of deceit, Bidloo drew the conclusion that Ruysch’s criticism was unfounded and nothing but pure malice. He announced that he in turn would produce ‘a sketch’ of Ruysch’s ‘art, erudition and diligence’. Bidloo proceeded to mount his offensive, first criticizing Ruysch’s illustrations in his book on the valves in the lymph vessels and then the accompanying observations, which he said contained nothing of note. He found fault with Ruysch’s Latin, gave proof that Ruysch himself had considered the spleen to be a gland, criticized the way in which Ruysch presented his preparations, mocked his painting skills, and generally heaped scorn and slander on him. Bidloo alleged that Ruysch had ingratiated himself with the midwives out of greed, and called his rival ‘brazen and dishonourable’, ‘a blight on the art of dissection’ and ‘a scandalous and disgraceful orator’.56 Ruysch did not take this criticism lying down. He retorted that Bidloo ‘had not only been a scandalous master and author of slander before this time, but that he was still wearing wolf’s clothing’. In his published rebuttal he declared that he preferred to devote his time to research, but now that he had been provoked—what is more, by ‘a person who has spent his whole life sowing discord and strife’—he felt compelled to defend his good name.57 Even though Bidloo had promised to refute the criticism of his anatomical atlas, Ruysch pointed out that Bidloo never replied directly to his criticism, but was evasive and twisted the facts. He challenged Bidloo to come to the anatomical theatre and give proof of his theories. Ruysch also countered Bidloo’s allegation that he was dishonest: ‘Has anyone ever accused me of corrupting the young? . . . Have I ever advised young men to disguise themselves before they go whoring? Did I ever stoop to unlawful behaviour? Have I ever stirred up trouble between husband and wife or best friends? . . . Never have I been suspected of consorting with whores.’ Ruysch concluded that Bidloo was ‘shameless, immoral, disgraceful, dishonourable, wicked, rash, low,

56

See AW 66. AW 439–483. Ruysch’s rebuttal, titled Responsio ad Godefridi Bidloi libellum cui nomen vindicias inscripsit, was translated into Dutch as Antwoort van Frederik Ruysch op het boekje van Govert Bidloo, hetwelk hij den naam van verdediging gegeven heft (Frederik Ruysch’s reply to the book by Govert Bidloo, which he has called a defence). 57

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lecherous, a moral canker, and an utter enemy of peaceful study’, and advised him to read the Thirteenth Satire of Juvenal: But, canst thou deem from all chastisement freed Men who beneath the scourge of conscience bleed? ................................... Oh! trust me, friend, the judge in hell below Cannot on crimes inflict so deep a woe As that poor mortal feels, by guilt oppressed Doomed day and night to bear the witness in his breast.58

Thus every evil deed turns upon its perpetrator. Ruysch then dealt, point by point, with his criticism of Bidloo and Bidloo’s own defence. Ruysch, who could not be said to be inexperienced, had never seen a human aorta divided into ascending and descending branches. Bidloo argued that Vesalius and others had also depicted the aorta in that way, but Ruysch thought this neither here nor there. A mistake was a mistake, even one made in emulation of Vesalius. Ruysch marvelled, moreover, at ‘how great a protector of the Ancients is our Bidloo, who was previously so hostile to them!’ Ruysch admitted that he had also called the spleen a gland: ‘I do not deny that this organ previously misled me, as it did other anatomists . . . but to admit this and to rectify it seems to Bidloo a grave error.’ At some point Ruysch had resolved to reconsider the entire human anatomy and to accept nothing as true that could not be confirmed by observation. That moment had coincided with the perfection of his preparation method, which had enabled him to make many new discoveries: ‘I stand by my resolution to adhere to this method, just as Bidloo seems bent on covering up old errors with new ones.’ Bidloo had voiced criticism of the depiction of the lymph vessels in the liver that Ruysch had included in his book on the lymph valves. Ruysch reminded his readers that not only had Bidloo translated that book, but he had been very proud of the translation, as was apparent from the dedication ‘in which, in the manner of a sycophant, he praises me as highly as he now tries to humiliate me’. Ruysch acknowledged that more than thirty years earlier he had depicted the liver and the vessels out of proportion, but this had been intentional, because in such a small book it was impossible to depict a life-size horse liver,

58

From The Thirteenth Satire of Juvenal, translated by John Quincy Adams.

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and he had wanted to show the valves. He also acknowledged that those old depictions of his were less accurate than his present ones: ‘I readily admit that at that time I had not yet delved so deeply into the innermost secrets of anatomy, nor am I ashamed to confess that in the last thirty years I have learned a great deal.’ Bidloo had ridiculed him for signing the depictions, but Ruysch did not understand what was so strange about that. He was not entirely unpractised in the art of painting, so he had made the illustrations himself and put his name to them. He thought it ‘not to be scorned, if a dissectionist takes up drawing and, time permitting, painting’. Bidloo had also slyly repeated something said twenty years earlier, during the pamphlet war, namely that in his instruction to the midwives, Ruysch had spoken in an indecent manner about the genitals. Ruysch retaliated by asking Bidloo why the genitals in plates 31, 33, 41 and 54 of his atlas were depicted so lewdly, while they were totally irrelevant. He was referring to four plates in which De Lairesse had depicted not only the body parts under discussion, but also the sexual organs, complete with pubic hair. Ruysch said that he had been hired by the burgomasters to instruct the midwives in obstetrics and anatomy. No men were allowed to attend those lessons, only the members of the Collegium Medicum and the officers of the surgeons’ guild. It was therefore impossible for Bidloo to know what went on in Ruysch’s lessons, unless he had been told by his brother, an apothecary who was a member of the Collegium Medicum. Ruysch thought it unnecessary to serve the midwives the same dry fare he dished up in his other anatomy lessons. In those he always used chaste language, but who could blame him for calling a cunt a cunt, for clarity’s sake, in gatherings attended by adult women only? Bidloo upbraided Ruysch for having misgivings about some of his own conclusions, to which Ruysch replied: ‘I could write in the manner of Bidloo that it was “mathematically certain”, but it was and remains my intention to record certain things as certain, doubtful things as doubtful, probable things as probable.’ Bidloo also accused Ruysch (whom he addressed as praelector rather than professor) of feeding nonsense to his pupils. Ruysch, in turn, referred ironically to Bidloo’s ‘profound knowledge and faithful instruction’, which he had heard about from students: ‘Germans and others, more learned than their teacher, leave Leiden, the seat of scholarship, because of Govert’s negligence and ignorance . . . All those who know about Govert’s lifestyle and his profound lessons frankly confess that he is an unschooled

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braggart, the disdain and disgrace of the Academy and of the professorial order.’ In reply to the assertion that his embalmed bodies would turn an ugly black colour if exposed to air, Ruysch explained that each preparation was different, and some could tolerate exposure to air. A number of his preparations were more than thirty years old and still in perfect condition. Others had to be preserved in a special way to maintain their healthy glow. But, Ruysch asked, ‘What does it matter how I preserve them, as long as they remain intact?’ He thought he had presented sufficient proof that Bidloo did not know the secret of his preservation method: ‘Bidloo must forgive me for not believing his braggadocio, for it is abundantly clear to me that most of the things in his pathetic cabinet were not prepared by him.’ Bidloo criticized the way Ruysch presented his collection. He admitted that Ruysch took good care of his preparations, but objected to their ornamentation. Ruysch found this surprising, because Bidloo, in preparation for a doctoral ceremony, had once had the Academy auditorium decorated so gaudily that it seemed more like a venue ‘suitable to performing Bidloo’s Phaeton’. In response to Bidloo’s disparaging remarks about his use of language, Ruysch admitted that he spent more time dissecting than on refining his Latin: ‘Not that I think this commendable, but I hope that all those who know how little time I have at my disposal will see fit to forgive me.’ While Ruysch was preparing his reply, Bidloo published another book, in which he laughed at Ruysch’s frequent use of such words as ‘wondrous’ and ‘wonderful’.59 Bidloo, Ruysch said, did not defend himself openly, ‘because he knows he is incapable of it, and in order to pull the wool over his readers’ eyes, he offers an opportunity for laughter, so that his ignominious defeat is less noticeable’. Ruysch suggested that Bidloo publish a biography of ‘the wonderful Govert, in which countless wonders occur, namely his wonderfully well-known integrity . . . his wondrous knowledge of anatomy and physics, and even his wondrously wonderful and consummate experience in the field of medicine’.

59

Bidloo, Mirabilitas.

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Peter the Great in Amsterdam A variety of visitors made their way to Ruysch’s museum: tourists, interested amateurs, and students and doctors of medicine from many countries. His guests included natural scientists and other scholars, as well as the occasional dignitary. From time to time the museum was even honoured with a royal visit. In the summer of 1695, Johann Wilhelm, Elector Palatine, and his wife, a daughter of Cosimo de’ Medici, travelled incognito around Holland. In Amsterdam the Elector visited the famous collections of Levinus Vincent and Johannes Smetius, as well as the museum of Ruysch, who noted with satisfaction that Johann Wilhelm took pleasure in viewing his collection.60 Their meeting would have consequences in the long run, but first there was another crucial meeting that would enhance Ruysch’s prestige considerably. In the summer of 1697, Ruysch was visited by a number of scholars, one of whom was the botanist William Sherard, who had studied in Leiden and Padua. Among the visitors that summer were several Russians, for whom anatomy was a new discipline (a German traveller had noted forty years previously that dissection was forbidden in Russia).61 One of the Russians—who in 1697–1698 travelled throughout the Netherlands, Germany and Italy, and kept a travel journal— wrote the following about his stay in Amsterdam: ‘Visiting a doctor of anatomy, I saw human bones, tendons and brains, the bodies of children from conception to birth, hearts, lungs and kidneys, and how stones form in the kidneys, and various internal organs preserved in spirits that had remained in good condition for many years. I saw the preserved skin of a person, thicker than that of a ram; the skin above the brain is covered with tendons, the bones in the ears resemble little hammers. All sorts of animals are preserved here in spirits: monkeys of all kinds, birds, snakes, frogs, fish and many other very remarkable animal species . . . In the same house I saw a large collection of rare and very strange beetles and butterflies.’62 60 Three surgeons in the employ of Johann Wilhelm, Elector Palatine, visited Ruysch on 14 July. Pierre Eijlers wrote in the guestbook: ‘I have had the honour of being in the house of the highly renowned Dr Ruysch for the purpose of seeing his curiosities.’ See the dedication to the Cabinet der dieren of 1710. 61 Amsterdam University Library, MS I E 20. See Adam Olearius, Relation du voyage de Moscovie, Tartarie et de Perse (1656), 128. 62 Raptschinsky, Reizigers.

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The Russian traveller was an envoy from Tsar Peter, sovereign ruler of the large Kingdom of Muscovy. The young tsar—he was twentyfive—had decided to modernize his country, primarily with a view to waging war more efficiently. His father had made a start, but Peter resolved to implement more radical reforms. He began by sending young men abroad to learn all they could about seafaring, with an eye to building up a fleet strong enough to compete with the Swedes in the Baltic Sea. They were also told to familiarize themselves with as many other useful achievements of Western culture as possible by visiting businesses and institutions as well as universities and men of learning. Peter soon travelled to the West himself to acquire first-hand knowledge of Western science and technology. In Russia he had met foreign workers from Holland’s Zaan region, so he knew where he could become skilled at shipbuilding. He also wanted to meet Nicolaas Witsen, who had written a book about shipbuilding and had served as Peter’s go-between in the purchase of warships. In Western Europe the Kingdom of Muscovy was considered backward, but the tsar could count on a great deal of goodwill, since his troops had defeated the Turks the previous year near the stronghold of Azov on the Black Sea. The news of that victory was received in Holland with rejoicing, for the Turks had been seen as a threat since 1683, when they had advanced far enough to lay siege to Vienna. A ‘Paean to the conquest of Azov’ portrayed the tsar as a Russian Caesar.63 Hoping to cash in on this advantageous position, the tsar came to Holland with a delegation seeking support for his struggle against the sultan. Support would be welcome, of course, but for the tsar the delegation was also a pretext to travel abroad. On 9 March 1697, he left Moscow with a party of 250 persons, and at the beginning of June he sent word from Königsberg to the States General that he was on his way to The Hague. His letter, which arrived in early July, was the cause of some alarm, because The Hague was currently the venue of peace talks that would culminate in the Treaty of Rijswijk. France, one of the parties to the talks, was an ally of Turkey, so the Russian delegation could not be received immediately. When the tsar and his retinue arrived in Holland in mid-August, they were given temporary accommodation in Amsterdam.

63

Bake, Mengelpoëzy, 86.

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Fig. 26 Portrait of Nicolaas Witsen (1641–1717), 1677. Witsen published Aloude en hedendaegsche scheepsbouw en bestier in 1671, and in 1675 he began to form a collection. In 1687 he commissioned the first map of Siberia (Tartary) and sent a copy to the tsar, to whom the map was dedicated. Witsen had a study of North and East Tartary printed in 1692, but he prevented its distribution because he was continually adding new information. An island near Nova Zembla was named after him, as were a river in Australia and a mountain chain in South Africa. In 1689 he was elected to the Royal Society in London (Amsterdam City Archives).

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The tsar did not lead the delegation himself. He was travelling incognito as Captain Peter Mikhailov, hoping in this way to prevent his Russian subjects from noticing that he was out of the country.64 Moreover, travelling in disguise gave him the necessary freedom of movement to acquire the knowledge he sought. Peter went with a small party to Zaandam to learn the art of shipbuilding, but a locksmith who had worked in Moscow soon recognized him and the rumour quickly spread that the tsar of Muscovy was in town. The discovery of his identity was due in part to his indiscretion: ‘He sometimes acted rather peevish’, noted a native of Zaandam, who described the excitement caused by the presence of the mysterious visitor. The young Russian was striking, if only because of his height, which was said to be all of seven feet. He was described as tall and ‘well built’, with a round face, short brown curly hair and ‘cruel’ features. He dressed simply and ‘walked with a heavy tread’, continually moving his head and arms.65 One day the stranger bought prunes, which the shopkeeper poured into his hat. As he walked around eating them, he was followed by a large group of village boys. He offered prunes to a few of them, but rather nastily refused them to others. The boys began to throw grass and rotten apples and pears, and one of them threw a stone that hit the tsar in the neck. A riot was averted when the burgomasters, who had been informed of the stranger’s identity, sent the town crier around to issue a warning. The curious guest purchased a pleasure boat and sailed up and down the IJ, inspecting the passing ships and steering the vessel himself. He was soon followed by many small boats. Mooring his craft in Amsterdam and Haarlem, he demonstrated his agility by ‘jumping nimbly over several sloops’ and then onto the quay. On shore he attracted a lot of attention, but those who stared too impudently or came too close received a slap in the face.66 Two Amsterdammers laid a wager as to the identity of the person who had been staying in Zaandam since the previous Sunday ‘and had made many bravadoes there’. Was he or wasn’t he the ‘Grand Duke

64 Guenellon: ‘It is certain that the main purpose of this embassy was to cover up the tsar’s voyage’ (Lettre). 65 Pieter Guenellon described him as ‘extremely tall, strong, robust, fair of face’ (Lettre). 66 Utrecht University Library, Noomen notes.

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or Tsar of Muscovy’?67 When throngs of people came to gape at him, Peter soon left—after only a week—for Amsterdam, where the delegation was lodged in the Oudezijds Herenlogement, as guests of the merchants who traded with Russia, one of whom was Nicolaas Witsen. Travelling incognito as he was, Peter could not be called an official guest, but the authorities gave him a royal welcome all the same. While cannon boomed, a procession of horses and carriages accompanied the ambassadors through the city to their boardinghouse, where the civic militia had lined up. That evening spectators crowded onto the bridges for a display of fireworks on the River Amstel. The next day the tsar and his retinue were received at the Town Hall. They were also shown the Admiralty’s warehouses, and given a lecture on the equipage of warships. The gentlemen of the Amsterdam Admiralty were surprised at the knowledge the tsar exhibited, as he asked very detailed and highly relevant questions. This tour was followed by a spectacular ‘mock battle’ on the IJ, designed to show the tsar the various formations in which a naval battle could be fought. Before thousands of spectators gathered on hundreds of vessels, the ships carried out all kinds of manoeuvres to the sound of continuous firing from frigates and yachts. Peter made the acquaintance of Nicolaas Witsen, who led him around the city and mediated with the authorities. Witsen was the right person for this job: in 1664–1665 he had gone to Russia, where he had met Peter’s father. He had remained intensely involved with the country ever since. When the arrival of the Russian delegation was announced, the reception committee contacted Witsen and asked him to find interpreters. Thanks to Witsen, the tsar received permission to stay at the shipyard of the Dutch East India Company in order to observe the shipbuilding going on there. He lived at the shipyard for several months, and because it could be reached only by crossing a drawbridge, he was protected there from curious onlookers. Peter and some of his men trained as shipbuilders and occasionally went sightseeing. The tsar was particularly fascinated by the quacks operating on the Botermarkt, who taught him to pull teeth.68

67

Amsterdam City Archives, notarial archive 6454, notary Hendrik de Wilde, 24 August 1697. 68 For a full report of Peter’s stay in Amsterdam, see Driessen, Tsaar Peter de Grote en zijn Amsterdamse vrienden.

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In addition to seafaring, the tsar was interested in health care, primarily in order to treat the army’s sick and wounded. Russia had no institutions that trained doctors, and attempts to found medical schools had failed. All of the trained doctors in Russia had received their schooling in the West; in fact, there were only a few dozen qualified physicians in the entire realm. During his travels through Russia, Witsen had been surprised at the backwardness of Russian medicine, having noted at the time that ‘the Russian medicaments consist of brandy, pepper and garlic’. Peter’s interest in medicine prompted Witsen to put him in touch with Frederik Ruysch, who showed him his collection. The tsar was particularly impressed by Ruysch’s anatomical specimens. He asked countless questions and could hardly take his eyes off the preparations. Indeed, he was so amazed at the lifelike appearance of the embalmed children that he bent down to kiss one. Ruysch could not imagine a greater compliment. Twenty-five years later, as a man in his eighties, he looked back with satisfaction on this triumph, unable to conceal his pride as he wrote: ‘I prepared the face of a boy so beautifully that a certain great monarch in Europe embraced and kissed it.’69 On 17 September the tsar wrote in Russian in Ruysch’s guestbook: ‘I, the undersigned, having undertaken a journey to see most of Europe, have been here in Amsterdam to acquire skills of which I earlier had need and to view things here, not least the anatomical skills demonstrated by Mr Ruysch, and according to the custom of this house I have signed this with my own hand.’70 Ruysch also led the tsar around the Hortus, where the monarch was received by the burgomasters, who treated him to several refreshments: ‘Exotic trees and plants, also from the Indies’, Peter recorded in his journal, ‘in cold weather they are kept in sheds.’ In his desire to learn all he could about anatomy, the tsar returned to Ruysch’s several times. Just as he was determined to master the art of shipbuilding, he aspired to learn every one of Ruysch’s techniques, and thus resolved to take lessons from him. One day, on his way to the anatomical theatre, he was spotted by the young Danish anatomist Jakob Winsløv, who would later become famous under the name of Winslow. That spring Winslow had attended one of Bid-

69 70

AW 1222. Amsterdam University Library, MS I E 20, p. 30.

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Fig. 27 Peter the Great’s entry in Frederik Ruysch’s guestbook. Below the tsar’s writing is the rather shaky hand of Alexander Menshikov (Amsterdam University Library).

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loo’s courses in Leiden, where, to his surprise, Bidloo had given an explanation of the circulation of blood in a foetus that did not tally with existing knowledge. He was unaware that Bidloo had borrowed the explanation from a French doctor, whose theories had caused a stir in Paris.71 During his class Bidloo had asked Winslow’s opinion of his explanation, and Winslow had answered naively that not only did he not understand Bidloo’s demonstration, but that it conflicted with his explanation. Bidloo had flown into a rage and subsequently ignored him, whereupon Winslow left for Amsterdam, where he had been impressed by Ruysch’s anatomical collection. One morning he saw the tsar alone with Ruysch as the two men rode in a carriage to the anatomical theatre.72 The tsar attended a number of Ruysch’s lessons in the Weigh House until, to his great regret, he was prevented from doing so by the crowds of curious onlookers who flocked to the theatre. The presence of the tsar enabled the apprentice-surgeons—whose lesson handouts doubled as admission tickets—to earn sizeable sums of money by ‘selling’ their seats at these lessons. Because many of those present were more interested in the guest of honour than in the anatomical demonstration, Ruysch reserved Wednesday morning to give the tsar a private lesson on anatomy and surgical intervention. Peter also wanted to visit the hospital. It was next door to his boardinghouse, but whenever he went outside, he had to weave his way through the throngs of people waiting to catch a glimpse of him. A passageway was subsequently built, so that he could reach the hospital without going outdoors. On 20 September the Treaty of Rijswijk was signed, and the subsequent departure of the French delegation meant that the Russians could finally be received in The Hague. The ambassadors left Amsterdam, followed by the tsar (disguised in a blond wig) in the company of Nicolaas Witsen. From The Hague the tsar visited Leiden, where he attended a lecture given by Govert Bidloo in the anatomical theatre, which had recently been embellished with objects from Bidloo’s collection. Peter made the acquaintance of Govert’s nephew Nicolaas, a versatile young man who had received his doctorate in medicine under his uncle’s supervision. (In 1702 Nicolaas would be summoned

71 72

See Lister, Journey. Maar, Autobiographie Winslow, 30, 37.

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to Russia to take up a post as one of the tsar’s personal physicians.73) Peter also met Anthony van Leeuwenhoek, who used magnifying glasses to demonstrate the circulation of the blood in the transparent tail of a young eel. The tsar lost no time in having microscopes sent to Russia. On 27 November the tsar—in the company of Witsen, Ruysch and Hudde—visited the young Swiss doctor Johann Konrad Amman, who had made a name for himself by teaching deaf-mutes to speak. After a close study of the processes of speech production, Amman had come up with the idea of teaching the deaf to speak by having them feel the vibrations in their throats. After receiving his doctorate in 1687 in Basel, he had put his method into practice. His star pupil was Hester Coolaart, the deaf-and-dumb daughter of the Haarlem merchant Pieter Coolaart. Amman had started to work with her seven years earlier, when Hester was a girl of seven and he a young man of twenty-one. At the time, Hester communicated almost exclusively by means of gestures. The only word she could utter was ‘papa’; her father’s attempts to teach her to say ‘mama’ had failed. Amman explained that this was because the deaf could not, of their own accord, make any nasal sounds. Within a few months he had taught the girl to speak. He had her feel the sounds of speech by placing her fingers first on his throat and then on her own; he also showed her how to form the sounds and made her look in the mirror when imitating them. The Remonstrant clergyman Philippus van Limborch, an acquaintance of Hester’s parents, wrote about her in detail to John Locke, telling him that it had taken just six months for her to master entire sentences. She was already able to recite the Lord’s Prayer and had learned how to read as well, for every time she had learned to pronounce a letter, Amman had written it down for her to see. A great many interested individuals had come to see this miracle with their own eyes.74 Winslow, too, had travelled to Haarlem to verify the story. He confirmed that the girl could actually speak, and received from her a copy of Amman’s book, in which his

73 Nicolaas Bidloo was a son of Lambert Bidloo. In November 1701 he married Clasina Cloes, a daughter of the Amsterdam surgeon Dirk Cloes. Nicolaas painted a portrait of his Uncle Govert. According to Katarina Lescaille, Nicolaas was a young man ‘who succeeds in coupling useful arts with erudition, the brush and play of strings with his poetry’ (Toneel- en mengelpoëzy, 126, 147, 216). 74 Corr. Locke IV, 267.

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method was described. Bearing the title Surdus loquens, the book was translated into English almost immediately. To mark Amman’s birthday, Elisabeth Hooftman, Hester Coolaart’s stepmother, composed a poem suffused with admiration and gratitude. What Amman had achieved had not even been dreamed of by the Ancients: A thousand ears, a thousand eyes now witness Amman’s wondrous deeds, Seeing those endowed with speech stand speechless in surprised delight As he empowers the deaf to speak.

‘Little Hester’ was ‘the great masterpiece of Amman’s art’. Meanwhile a girl of fourteen, Hester had been summoned from Haarlem to Amsterdam, so that Amman could demonstrate to the astonished tsar the efficacy of his teaching methods.75 On 14 December the tsar witnessed the beheading of two criminals.76 The body of Jan Jansz Bloemsaat, executed for manslaughter, was put at the disposal of the surgeons’ guild and subsequently dissected by Ruysch. One of the Russians in the tsar’s retinue described both the execution and the anatomy lesson. He related that the two suspects were first tortured on the rack, and after confessing to murder, had been brought before the magistrates. The day before the sentence was to be carried out, the men were informed of their fate and given their last meal. On the day of the execution, prayers were said, and then ‘they were led to the gallows, where they knelt down and the executioner chopped off their heads. Clergymen were with them the whole time. One of the bodies was handed over for an anatomy lesson. I saw how the professor, in the presence of many physicians, cut the corpse to pieces: first they shaved the head and pulled the skin off the skull, then sawed through the head and removed the brain, after which they cut open the chest and showed the heart and lungs. All the internal organs were taken out of the corpse and examined closely to determine their purpose.’77

75 Scheltema, Rusland III, 386–387. Amman’s son Johan studied medicine in Leiden and was appointed in 1733 to the post of botanist at the Academy of Science in St Petersburg. 76 Scheltema, Peter II, 216. 77 Raptschinsky, Russische reizigers.

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The tsar became well acquainted with Ruysch and several other scientists and collectors. In December he paid a number of visits to Jacob de Wilde, a brother-in-law of Pieter Guenellon, who was a customs officer at the Admiralty and had an extraordinary collection of coins, statues and paintings at his house on the Keizersgracht. The tsar viewed his collection and signed the guestbook. On the back of the page signed by the tsar, his court jester, Philat, signed his name, after which the tsar, wanting to show off his knowledge of Dutch, wrote ‘geck’ (‘fool’) beside the man’s name. De Wilde’s fifteen-yearold daughter Maria made a drawing of the visit. On his last visit to De Wilde, the tsar discussed religion with the Remonstrant clergyman Johannes Brandt.78 Peter thought there was far too much philosophizing about religion in Amsterdam. Was so much sophistication necessary to acknowledge that Jesus Christ was the Messiah and that one should adhere to Christian morals? In Russia obscure passages in the Bible were simply ignored. Pieter Guenellon, who was part of the assembled company, heard the tsar say that he detested persecution and that he considered moral restraint a reprehensible form of tyranny. Guenellon was impressed by the tsar: ‘Even though his eyes are lively, black and piercing when he speaks animatedly, his features are nevertheless very gentle. He is extremely affable and wishes to be kept informed of all the scientific discoveries made here.’ Guenellon was enchanted by the way the tsar treated De Wilde, conversing ‘with so much kindness and gentility . . . his geniality has attracted many people to his service’.79 The tsar tried to entice as many skilled Westerners as possible to Russia. Several years before his journey, he had already contracted highly skilled carpenters through the Amsterdam merchants in Archangel. Now seeking specialists in other fields, he asked Ruysch which surgeons he should employ. One of his recruits was twenty-three-yearold Jan Hovy, who had treated him in Amsterdam after a fall from a crane.80 Working conditions in Russia were, medically speaking, far from appealing, but that was compensated for by a salary unthinkable to most doctors working in the Netherlands. Nicolaas Bidloo, for

78

Guenellon mentioned the conversation in a letter to Locke, ‘to underline the good opinion you have of the tsar’s religion’ (Corr. Locke VI, 338; 14 March 1698). 79 Guenellon, Lettre, 239. 80 Jan Hovy became chief surgeon of the Russian Admiralty.

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instance, received 500 roubles a year, equivalent to 1,500 guilders, the salary of a prominent professor. The tsar remained in Amsterdam until mid-January 1698, when he crossed the Channel to England. Before his departure the authorities laid on a farewell dinner, from which the seventy-two-year-old burgomaster Johan Huydecoper—who was seated next to the tsar—tried in vain to escape when he noticed litre-size glasses being filled to the brim. Before leaving, the tsar gave one of Ruysch’s daughters—probably Lucretia, who led visitors around the collection—four pairs of sable skins.81 The tsar took only fifteen people from his retinue with him to England. One member of the party was De Wilde’s eldest son. This was an unexpected opportunity for him, but his parents worried about the company he would keep, consorting with people whose customs were so different from theirs. They asked themselves what they should do if the tsar decided to take their son to Moscow to tutor his eight-year-old son.82 Those of the tsar’s retinue who stayed behind now busied themselves recruiting seamen and skilled artisans, and buying weapons and munitions. A number of them, profiting from what the Dutch considered a ‘cruel winter’, learned to skate. One of the leaders of the delegation, the diplomat Fyodor Golovin—a very cultured gentleman, according to Guenellon—paid Ruysch a visit. After inspecting the collection, he wrote in the guestbook: ‘Our poor lives are unfathomable.’83 At the beginning of May the tsar returned to Amsterdam, where he spent a month before leaving for Russia in early June. Once back in his native country, he had a selection of Russian naturalia sent to Ruysch from Moscow.84

81 On the departure of the tsar, see Kooijmans, Vriendschap, 147–148. The painter Cornelis de Bruijn, who was given financial support by Witsen, recounted how he had been introduced at court in Moscow in 1702 by the Dutch resident Hendrik van der Hulst. De Bruijn was not equal to such large drinking vessels either. 82 Egbert Veen to John Locke, 15 March 1698 (Corr. Locke VI, 341). 83 Amsterdam University Library, MS I E 20, 13 February 1698; Guenellon, Lettre, 225. 84 The tsar sent Ruysch (via Witsen) worms and lizards. In a letter of 1 July 1701, Ruysch thanked the tsar for the shipment of the glass jars containing these specimens. He advised the tsar on feeding worms and collecting butterflies, and asked to be sent yellow-spotted worms, beetles, large flies, horseflies, strange frogs, snakes, rats and flying squirrels preserved in vodka. He sent the tsar ‘a most curious lizard with sharp scales’, a cricket, two snakes and a strange bird from the East Indies, as well as another peculiar lizard, a two-headed snake and a golden beetle (Raptschinsky,

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From Brain to Scrotum Shortly after the tsar’s departure, Ruysch made a discovery that he would always consider one of the most important of his career. It was generally assumed that the cerebral cortex consisted of glands, since the distinguished Italian anatomist Malpighi claimed to have seen this under a microscope. Thanks to Ruysch’s sophisticated method of preparation, however, he had discovered that the cerebral cortex—‘a soft substance resembling boiled white starch’—contained countless little vessels. He concluded that Malpighi had been mistaken and that the cortex consisted entirely of vessels. This discovery naturally caused a stir. The anatomist Günter Christoph Schelhammer—once a student in Leiden, but now a professor at Kiel in Germany—was one of those who voiced their disbelief: ‘I should rather suffer my eyes to be gouged out than believe that the cortex consists not of glands, or a glandular substance, but of tubules and pipelets held together by arteries’, he wrote with his usual acerbity. But when two of Schelhammer’s pupils who subsequently attended Ruysch’s anatomy lessons were convinced by Ruysch, Schelhammer admitted defeat. Ruysch wrote to say that he did not hold it against him: indeed, in Schelhammer’s place he might not have believed it either.85 This discovery occasioned another clash with Govert Bidloo, who had described the cerebral cortex according to prevailing views. In a public anatomy lesson, Bidloo tried to demonstrate that Ruysch was wrong and that the cortex consisted of small round glands. He held the cerebral cortex in his hands and asked the audience if they did not see whether it consisted of such glands as he had described. He showed the cerebral cortex to the scholars sitting in the first row. No one contradicted him, until he came to Burcher de Volder, a professor of philosophy who in Ruysch’s view was not so inclined to accept things at face value, even if they agreed with existing knowledge. When questioned by Bidloo, De Volder replied: ‘No, sir.’86 Thirty years later Ruysch still told this story with relish. Ruysch taught a student from Anhalt in Germany that not all body parts could be treated in the same way. Some had to be dried first, Frederik Ruysch, 77; Radziun, Anatomische collectie, 51; Kopaneva, Geschichte, 155). Ruysch’s shipment was preserved in the apothecaries’ chancellery in Moscow. 85 AW 696–697, 1055–1056. 86 AW 1251. See also AW 1075–1076.

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Fig. 28 This illustration accompanied Ruysch’s reply to Gölicke (pp. 235–236). It shows the head of a young man Ruysch had embalmed. The blow-pipe has been inserted between the arachnoid membrane and the pia mater to separate the two by blowing air into them. The discrepancies between this illustration and the one in Bidloo’s atlas were obvious, ‘not only in this depiction, but in the object itself’, according to Ruysch.

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others should be examined fresh from the body, while still others— particularly the soft parts, such as the brain—were best viewed floating in a balsamic liquid.87 Ruysch described his method of preserving the brain in a letter to Michael Ernst Ettmüller, a student from Leipzig, who had been extremely surprised by the downy fuzz he saw on the arteries of the cerebral cortex. Ruysch told him about his discovery and invited him to publicize it by corresponding with him on the subject. In his letter Ettmüller described what he had observed in Ruysch’s laboratory, namely that, contrary to prevailing notions, the cerebral cortex appeared to consist of a collection of blood vessels. In his reply Ruysch went into detail about the make-up and preparation of the brain. He explained that it had previously been very difficult to ascertain its nature, owing to its softness and perishability. Brains were usually preserved by soaking and boiling them in oil of turpentine, but because this harmed the fibres, he had sought another method, and after frequent experimentation had discovered a way of examining the brain in minute detail. The brain’s soft, mushy consistency made it impossible to penetrate it sufficiently, so Ruysch ‘first filled up the blood vessels with a hard, waxy substance, taking care that they contain an amount equal to the blood in a living person’, so that the vessels retained their natural shape and thus served to support the brain. Ruysch then pressed out the water remaining in the ‘pipelets’, giving the brain a firm consistency comparable to fresh cheese. The next step was to suspend a piece of the cortex from a hair and to dip it repeatedly into a liquid until it unfolded into a profusion of ever finer branches. Such preparations could be preserved in liquid for many years, enabling unhurried dissection and accurate depiction. Until this time there had been no faithful likeness of the brain, because draughtsmen had never succeeded in depicting the brains set in front of them before they softened and caved in. But as Ruysch pointed out, ‘a brain prepared with my technique can be given immediately to the engraver’ and depicted ‘without fear of decay or stench’. It was this method of preparation that had enabled Ruysch to ascertain that the cerebral cortex consisted of blood vessels. Anatomists had always been misled, owing to ineffective preparation methods. To make matters worse, the lack of human brains often forced them to

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AW 325–332.

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turn to animal brains. Ruysch told Ettmüller that he had discovered something else after his departure: the hindmost segment of the brain— the medulla oblongata, literally ‘prolonged marrow’—was incorrectly illustrated in Bidloo’s anatomical atlas. Ruysch had also discovered that the nerves of the spinal marrow formed a fibrous continuation of the pia mater. The Amsterdam research group had observed this in animals, but now he had verified it in humans as well.88 Ruysch used his reply to Ettmüller not only to publicize his discoveries but also to settle a score with a rival, taking this opportunity to react to the publication of a letter—written by Johann Jacob Rau and addressed to the illustrious Frederik Ruysch—concerning the discovery of the partition in the scrotum. The first letter Ruysch had published contained a question posed by his pupil Johann Gaub about the partition in the scrotum that Ruysch had shown him. Gaub said he had been unable to find that partition in the literature, not even in the anatomical works of Blaes and Bidloo. Ruysch had replied that it was no wonder, because that partition had even escaped the notice of such great predecessors as Vesalius, Bartholin and De Graaf. This was because the scrotum of a freshly dead man was so slippery. To observe its true structure, it had to be prepared in a certain way: inflated and dried and then cut open with a sharp knife. In a private lesson Ruysch had shown Gaub a scrotum that was not inflated but embalmed, making it possible to see all the blood vessels, which was impossible in a scrotum ‘cut up’ and spread out in the usual way. Ruysch stressed that he had discovered the partition because his specimen had been prepared in a very special way, making it as hard as rock.89 When he showed the partition at a public demonstration, however, Johann Rau pointed out that it was nothing new, and said he could name various authors who had already published this fact. Ruysch replied that he doubted whether they had given such clear descriptions of the scrotum. The question was not so terribly important, but relations between the two men had been rather strained since Ruysch had objected to Rau’s giving public anatomy lessons. Moreover, Ruysch had supposedly offended Rau by pointing out the large number of body parts he used

88 89

AW 337–358. AW 227–246.

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during his anatomy lessons.90 Ruysch was extremely irritated by the surly and vehement Rau, ‘who considers us equals . . . Everyone knows the bluster and boasting with which he praises himself and his art.’ A German visitor agreed with him: ‘[Rau] swaggered tremendously, acting like a market crier while showing us his preparations.’91 Ruysch must have felt that the political tide was turning. The time in which Hudde, Witsen and Huydecoper were unassailable was nearing its end. The town council had ignored Ruysch’s protests, and the interest taken in Rau’s lessons had been growing steadily since 1698, when he had started to give them in Dutch. Rau had been appointed municipal surgeon, which gave him free access to the hospital and a right to some of its corpses. Ruysch fretted about this, because the supply of cadavers was running low, and there were fewer bodies available for his lessons. When Rau promised to name various authors who had described the partition in the scrotum more precisely than Ruysch, Ruysch replied, ‘If you do this, I shall consider you a great man.’ Rau had vowed to name the authors in the presence of ten doctors, but instead he had gone straight to the printer’s, publishing a letter in which he asserted that Ruysch was not the first to describe the partition. Rau disapproved of Hendrik Ruysch’s defence of his father and his assistance in the anatomical theatre and the Hortus, ‘when his father stammeringly reads aloud’. Rau spoke derisively of Ruysch’s ‘eloquence’, his ‘fine manner of reasoning’ and the ‘nimbleness of his hands’. Ruysch, offended, said that Rau had twisted his words. Ruysch had merely asserted that his depiction of the scrotum was clearer than anyone else’s, and he had never contested Rau’s claim that various authors had already written about the partition. Likewise there were those who said that Hippocrates had already described the circulatory system. Why, Ruysch asked, had no one found this in Hippocrates’ work until Harvey came along? Discoverers were snubbed, he said, and he gave as an example the French surgeon Jacques Beaulieu, alias Frère Jacques, who had introduced a new method of stone-cutting and been badly treated by Rau. Ruysch declared that he was not seeking fame as the discoverer of the partition: ‘I could mention other, more outstanding things that I

90 91

Medicus politicus, 80. Uffenbach, Merkwürdige Reisen III, 621–622.

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have demonstrated.’ Furthermore, it was well known that his method had enabled him ‘to discover a great many things and to demonstrate them in public, things inconceivable to the Ancients’, things of which Rau had never even dreamed. Even though the authors Rau named had known of the partition, had Ruysch not made a useful contribution? He had in any case added to existing knowledge and, most importantly, supplied an accurate illustration. Citing Hippocrates, he said that discovering new things useful to mankind was profitable scientific work, as was completing someone else’s unfinished business. But to belittle the findings of others ‘with wily and dishonest words’ seemed to him more like the work of jealous, stupid people, who thereby revealed their ignorance of the profession.92 The structure of the scrotum was by no means the only topic of discussion between Ruysch and Rau. Their competitive warfare was waged on various fronts. Ruysch applied his technique of arterial injection to Rau’s favourite object of study: the eye. He filled the arterial membrane, and during its subsequent dissection, part of it came loose, which made Ruysch think that it was divided into two layers. In fact, he succeeded twice in separating the membrane. When he announced his discovery at a public anatomy lesson, Rau laughed out loud. ‘It did not surprise me’, Ruysch said. ‘I told this great anatomist to go ahead and laugh at me, but in the meantime I have had an engraver illustrate it, to make this new discovery known to everyone.’93 His son Hendrik suggested naming the membrane the tunica Ruyschiana: ‘Who will blame me for this name,’ Ruysch said, ‘apart from my adversary J. Rau, who takes great pains to depreciate my discoveries?’ Ruysch said that Rau often made mistakes during anatomical demonstrations, and admitted that he sometimes did as well, ‘but I won’t allow him to say that the tunica Ruyschiana has deceived me . . . I shall never refuse to show it’. Rau, he said, ‘denies the existence of anything he cannot demonstrate himself ’. Rau had not been able to separate the arterial membrane, but he had demonstrated the partition in the scrotum, and to this Ruysch reacted with scorn. In reply to Ruysch’s retort, Rau published a letter in which

92

AW 359–361. AW 1056. See also AW 373–377. Ruysch followed the branchings of the central artery in the retina. In the back wall of the eye he separated a number of membranes. The hindmost was the chorioidea, which consisted of a double membrane: the outer one retained the name chorioidea, and the inner one was given the name tunica Ruyschiana. Rau thought that the specimen had been distorted by the injections. 93

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he informed his readers that he had been the first to see that the scrotum consisted of two separate sacs, each enclosing a testicle. They were so tightly connected, however, that the place where they came together was taken to be a partition. But with patience and experience, one could separate them, and Rau maintained that he could show two testicles in separate sacs. With regard to Ruysch’s presumed partition, he insisted that it was ‘altogether a figment of his imagination’.94 Another clash took place at the end of 1699, during one of Ruysch’s demonstrations, when Rau was among the many spectators who had flocked to the theatre. Ruysch told his audience that he found Rau’s letter impudent, because it accused him of inventing the scrotal partition, ‘as though I were anything like Rau, who is not ashamed to say whatever comes into his head, and does not hesitate to foist inventions on people as though they were truths . . . I admit that I am only human and can make mistakes, but it is very hard to bear the allegation that I invented it.’ Ruysch had a prepared scrotum, hard as rock, which he now showed to the audience—Rau among them—so that they could judge with their own eyes. Because the scrotum had never been prepared in this way, its partition had never been clearly visible. He was, in fact, defending his method of preparation, which had been dismissed by Rau as ‘showy’ and artificial. Ruysch argued that more could be seen in a prepared scrotum than in a ‘fresh’ one, but Rau clung to his idea that Ruysch’s method produced artificial results. In his first letter, Rau had written that Ruysch was famous for a variety of reasons and that his good character should be praised, but in his second letter he called Ruysch ‘an unworthy dissectionist’ who played tricks with his preparations. Ruysch knew that Rau said this frequently, but now that he had voiced it publicly, Ruysch felt compelled to react. Rau, he said, was curiously inconsistent, constantly alleging that his work was misleading and garish, while at the same time promising to teach his students the art of preparation, with which he was every bit as acquainted as Ruysch was. Rau had supposedly said: ‘Now I have discovered a way to fill the vessels of the heart as well as Ruysch, but I cannot dry them!’ Ruysch would gladly admit that his manner of preparation had failed more than once, as Rau had said, but he knew for certain that Rau would also fail a thousand times before he became as skilled at preparation as he was. 94

Uffenbach, Merkwürdige Reise III, 622.

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Rau blamed Ruysch for trying to prevent him from giving public demonstrations, but there was more to it than that. Ruysch admitted that after Rau had given demonstrations on two consecutive days, which ‘put him more and more in possession of what was mine’, he had gone on the third day to the burgomasters to say that Rau was overstepping his bounds. A ban immediately followed. When the officers of the surgeon’s guild summoned Rau to appear before them, and asked him whether he had permission from the authorities to demonstrate surgery in public, he replied: ‘Why should such a thing be any less permissible to me than to Ruysch?’ Ruysch concluded that Rau, who had been granted permission to perform only one week-long public dissection a year, apparently thought that he had been favoured with the title of professor.95 Outsiders found such quarrels among anatomists incomprehensible, and ridiculed them ‘because at the smallest discovery, which gives one of them a slight edge over the others, they attack each other like archenemies’: ‘One of them finds a gland here, the other there; what one sees as round in shape, the other sees as pyramidal.’ Such nonsense gave rise to mud-slinging and slander: ‘So there is always a dispute, and if there is no dispute, there is at least fierce jealousy’, in the words of one critic, who had witnessed a hateful exchange of words between Rau and Ruysch. Rau had been applauded for a short but lucid demonstration on the senses, which prompted Ruysch to remark that Rau had merely dished up a lecture that had undergone lengthy preparation, but he would not be so eloquent and methodical if forced to perform the public dissection of a body fresh from the gallows. Rau replied that he was not ashamed of his well-prepared speech, but that he would be ashamed of inviting, as Ruysch habitually did, ‘so many doctors and master-surgeons to an insignificant little dissection, which the worst of his pupils could perform better’.96 Stone-cutting In the summer of 1699, Frederik Ruysch received a visit from a controversial figure—the French stone-cutter Jacques Beaulieu, one of

95 96

AW 379–400. Medicus politicus, 116–118.

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many itinerant quacks and surgeons. Beaulieu, forty-eight years of age, dressed like a Franciscan friar, but with a hat instead of a hood. Pieter Guenellon had heard that Jacques had abandoned his surgeon’s shop fifteen years earlier to devote himself to peripatetic surgery, specializing in bladder and kidney stones, and abdominal hernias. He had worked in army hospitals and had supposedly accompanied an itinerant Italian stone- and hernia-cutter for five or six years. After that he had set up in business for himself in the south of France. Having gained something of a reputation, he donned a monk’s habit and began to call himself Frère Jacques. He charged needy patients nothing for his services, and managed to live on the recompense he received from those who could afford to pay. His method of stone-cutting differed from that of most qualified lithotomists. The usual method involved the insertion into the bladder, via the urethra, of a grooved iron rod, or probe. An assistant held this probe with one hand, and raised the scrotum with the other. The operator used one hand to stretch the skin of the perineum, and the other to feel around for the back of the probe, after which he made an incision below the scrotum, in the direction of the anus. The operator kept cutting until the knife touched the groove of the probe. Cutting along the groove, he made an opening in the ureter near the bladder. Another instrument inserted into the bladder through that opening served as a guide for the forceps used to extract the stone. The closed forceps were inserted into the bladder, and then opened halfway to search for the stone. When the operator managed to catch hold of the stone, he had to manoeuvre it out carefully through the bladder neck. This put strain on the sphincter, which was particularly painful. A patient had a reasonable chance of surviving the operation, but was then susceptible to nasty complications. Pulling the forceps with the stone through a passage so narrow inevitably caused damage to the tissue around the bladder neck, and the result was usually incontinence. Other organs could also be injured during the operation. Many patients continued to suffer from fistulae, through which their urine flowed instead of taking the usual route. A great interest was therefore taken in Frère Jacques’s method: the sectio lateralis. The principle of this method was to approach the bladder directly, so that the stone did not have to be removed through the bladder neck. Frère Jacques’s innovation was to make the incision two finger-widths to the left of the perineum in the direction of the tip of a probe inserted in the bladder.

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Frère Jacques impressed people with his swiftness. The English physician Martin Lister, who was staying in Paris in the spring of 1698, observed Jacques in the Hôtel-Dieu Hospital, operating on ten patients in the space of an hour.97 Three days later nearly all the patients appeared to have recovered, but most of them eventually proved to be suffering from some post-operative complaint. A number of them died a short while later. The problem was that Frère Jacques lacked the anatomical knowledge to know what might be damaged, so he simply plunged in fearlessly. By opening up the bodies of deceased patients, it was possible to tell what had gone wrong: he had perforated the rectum, for example, or cut through the prostate. The official surgeons thought that Frère Jacques’s method, when carefully used, offered possibilities, but they were critical of his devil-may-care approach. Of the sixty or so people he operated on in Paris at that time, only half were still alive at the end of the summer, and among the survivors, many had to cope with the unpleasant side effects of the operation. The surgeons thought Jacques a bungler, and objected strongly to the fact that he did not concern himself at all with post-operative care, his motto being ‘Jacques cuts you, the good Lord cures you’. This was typical of the itinerant operator’s mentality: he sought instant success, that is to say, the removal of the stone. Afterwards he left immediately, taking with him a favourable testimonial and abandoning his patients to their fate, which, more often than not, included life-threatening injuries. By then, however, Jacques had moved on. His success thus depended on his peripatetic existence. When his reputation waned, he took to the road again, travelling in 1699 to Holland. In the Netherlands, Frère Jacques was received with a certain amount of suspicion. Because of his selflessness, Frederik Ruysch and Pieter Guenellon were kindly disposed towards him, but this was not true of everyone. In a letter to a friend and fellow doctor in Haarlem, Ruysch complained about the ungracious treatment of ‘our good Frère Jacques . . . God only knows who is at the root of it’. He said he intended to warn Jacques about certain people. His generally good opinion of the man was obvious: ‘We are grateful for the services he has rendered to so many poor people.’98 Ruysch received the controversial cutter at home, and Jurriaan Pool painted his portrait. In August the bur-

97 98

Lister, A Journey to Paris, 232–236. Amsterdam University Library, MS I 96.

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gomasters gave Frère Jacques permission to operate in Amsterdam. Eleven people were allowed to attend a demonstration: the professors Ruysch and Bernagie, the hospital physicians Van Dortmond and Guenellon, and the leading operators of the city, including Johann Rau, Pieter Adriaansz, the latter’s son Adriaan Verduijn and his son-in-law Gommer van Bortel. They watched as the stone-cutter’s assistants tied the patient to the table, gave him brandy to sedate him, and put a pillow over his face. Frère Jacques operated roughly, but with merciful speed. A probe was inserted into the ureter and then a dagger thrust in to the left between the anus and the ischium. Guided by the probe, he felt around for the bladder, exploring it with his fingers until he found the stone, which he removed with forceps. Frère Jacques was allowed to work for a time in Amsterdam. He was obviously skilful, but sometimes hasty and rough, not to mention careless with his instruments. When operating on the son of a silversmith, he could not find his ‘butcher knife’. A witness reported that ‘he called to the assistants, and one of them handed him a knife, but it was blunt . . . Flaying and digging he came into the bladder and pulled out the stone in his fashion, but the boy died the following day.’ On another occasion he was operating on a boy in a surgeon’s shop when one of the onlookers saw ‘a torn-off membrane, which Frère Jacques cleverly concealed in his napkin’. In a boardinghouse on the Oudezijds Voorburgwal, he operated in a single session on three patients, two of whom recovered. At the end of September he operated on a boy of fourteen. At first he could not feel the stone, and removed the probe, but the physicians and surgeons present assured him of the stone’s existence, so he inserted the catheter again and this time he felt it. He made an incision in his crude way, whereupon the boy practically leapt off the operating table. But Jacques managed to remove a stone the size of a chestnut, and the boy recovered fully within three weeks.99 Before leaving again for France, Frère Jacques was given permission to operate in Leiden, Rotterdam and Zutphen. Guenellon wrote an enthusiastic letter about him to John Locke, giving a precise account of his working method and its advantages: ‘He cuts very skilfully and very successfully. We have not yet seen any fistulae resulting from his operations; the wounds of all the survivors are healing. He also operates on women.’ In just three months Jacques had operated on three

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Titsingh, Steen, 218–222.

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hundred people. The Dutch stone-cutters were jealous and spoke ill of him, but they were wrong, in Guenellon’s opinion: ‘This is certainly a very sincere man, who is motivated by compassion and charity. He lives very austerely and has the gratifications he receives distributed to the poor . . . I approve of him whole-heartedly.’100 The Amsterdam stone-cutters had a less favourable opinion of the man, but they had to admit that he was an adroit operator and that his method offered interesting possibilities, though it needed refinement if his mistakes were to be avoided. Stone-cutters such as Rau, Van Bortel and Ulhoorn tried to reach the bladder without perforating the rectum, or, even more deadly, damaging the ureter, which Frère Jacques often stabbed. They tried to avoid mistakes by taking a more scientific approach.101 In the summer of 1704, Frère Jacques paid another visit to Holland, having been forced to leave Paris after a prominent noble had died on the operating table. Jacques, who had meanwhile improved his technique, was given permission to operate on three people at the hospital. The surgeon Dirk Cloes (who had been trained by Cyprianus and Van Bortel) was present at these operations and observed approvingly that Jacques made his incision very low, to the side of the perineum. When he saw this, he thought: ‘Now we can do away with curved forceps.’102 Rau learned the principle of the lateral incision by observing Frère Jacques’s operations, and in the following years adopted and developed this technique further. Inserting the knife directly into the bladder eliminated the side effects of incontinence and impotence. Only someone with a thorough grasp of anatomy could operate in this way, but the advantage of Rau’s working method was that the urethra, bladder neck and prostate remained intact, and the stone could be removed more easily. Because there was scarcely any tearing or straining, the operation was also less painful. Thanks to Rau, Frère Jacques’s technique became accepted and respectable. Rau kept the precise nature of his working method a secret. He was duly censured for this, but ignored his critics and went on to become a renowned lithotomist. Even so, he was just as fallible as Frère Jacques, as evidenced by something the surgeon Bram Titsingh once wrote about

100 101 102

Guenellon to Locke, 22 September 1699 (Corr. Locke VI, 691). Titsingh, Steen, 152, 177. Titsingh, Steen, 96.

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him: ‘He has cut into the rectum more than once . . . On more than one occasion he provoked haemorrhaging in the urethra . . . whereupon he pressed the penis between his fingers for as long as it took for the blood to clot and the vessels to stop bleeding.’103 Ruysch, Rau and Bidloo Rau had not learned his skills at university but from the writings of experienced surgeons and his own observation of surgical practice, in Paris in particular. He had learned a lot during his travels, gleaning the tricks of the trade from the great practitioners. Rau impressed upon his audience the value of underpinning practical surgery with solid reasoning, and assured them of the soundness of his working methods. According to the surgeon Hendrik Ulhoorn, who emulated him, Rau’s arrival in Amsterdam was a blessing for patients and surgeons alike. Rau was a doctor, Ulhoorn said, ‘whose thorough knowledge of the human constitution enabled him to save patients who were seriously ill, and to illuminate dark cases, such as the difficult work of stonecutting, among many others’. According to Ulhoorn, Rau also attracted many foreign students, ‘who paid great sums of money to learn our art from him, so much so that many who were eager to learn—as I still remember vividly, thirty to forty in number—left the academy in Leiden to receive instruction from that excellent man’. This testified not only to the high quality of Rau’s lessons, but to ‘the failure of the diligent Professor Bidloo to live up to his talents’.104 One of Rau’s foreign students was Jakob Winslow, who in the summer of 1697 signed up, at great expense, for a year-long course in surgery. He learned no fewer than eighty operations, and found the lessons so instructive that he stayed on for another year. He also followed a course in anatomy taught by Rau. Winslow generally found Rau rather proud and difficult, but Rau was fond of Winslow, so the two got on well together. Rau let him watch various lithotomies, and Winslow reported that Rau was so nimble-fingered that even those standing nearest him could not see exactly what he was doing.105 A German pupil described Rau as an incomparable anatomist and

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Titsingh, Steen, 137–138. Ulhoorn, Tweede vertoog, 358, 360. Winslow, Autobiographie, 30–34.

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surgeon, who surpassed even Vesalius in his powers of judgement and surgical expertise.106 In November 1705 the University of Leiden granted Rau permission to give demonstrations in the anatomical theatre, despite protests from Govert Bidloo. Until 1702 Bidloo had benefited from the protection of Willem III, but since the stadholder-king’s death he had run into difficulties. He had been roundly criticized for neglecting his teaching duties during the lengthy periods in which the king had required his services in England. Bidloo’s English sojourn had been crowned by his appointment to the Royal Society, but he had also become embroiled there in conflicts that had marred his reputation. Bidloo’s anatomical atlas was not selling well, so in 1697 the Amsterdam publisher Hendrik Boom sold three hundred of the plates, engraved after drawings by Gerard de Lairesse, to the London booksellers Samuel Smith and Benjamin Walford, printers to the Royal Society. Smith and Walford had heard that the plates were beautiful but the texts worthless, so they employed the surgeon William Cowper to translate the entries into English, at the same time improving and completing them. (Cowper was still rather young, but in 1694 he had published an anatomical work on muscles that was well received by John Locke and others.) The English version of the atlas was then published under the title The Anatomy of Human Bodies. Cowper had thoroughly revised the texts and his name therefore appeared on the title page. In the foreword he mentioned that the illustrations were drawn by De Lairesse, ‘and were some time since publish’d by dr. Bidloo, now Professor of Anatomy in the University of Leyden’. In the Netherlands, Bidloo—who had attempted to silence his critics by announcing that his atlas had been highly praised in England— was furious when he saw that the English edition made no mention of his name. He published a venomous pamphlet in which he criticized Cowper’s corrections and accused him of plagiarism. Cowper, who knew of the controversy between Ruysch and Bidloo, responded to the pamphlet by announcing that he would give due consideration to the many outstanding talents of Godefricus Bidloo, widely celebrated professor at the illustrious academy at Leiden, and to his anatomical knowledge, his integrity and genius, his elegant Latin and his witticisms, not to mention his faithfulness, courtesy, sincerity,

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Erndtl, Relation.

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discernment, humility and great refinement. Cowper pointed out that while De Lairesse’s drawings were good, Bidloo’s entries were inadequate. Bidloo could not have made the preparations himself, and had clearly borrowed ideas from others. Cowper said that Bidloo had offered to help with the text revision, in the hope that the changes would be attributed to him, but Cowper had declined Bidloo’s offer, given Ruysch’s experience with the man. Cowper said that his publishers were responsible for omitting Bidloo’s name on the title page. He defended himself against Bidloo’s criticism of his version, stressed his ignorance, and mentioned his ill treatment of Ruysch. Bidloo excelled in the use of big words and references to antiquity, but in Cowper’s view, the subject itself, and not the language used to discuss it, was the important part. Bidloo saw things that were not there and took known things to be novelties. Cowper advised Bidloo to immerse himself in the study of anatomy, grammar and ethics, saying he would do better to refrain from writing books until he had reached the age at which his youthful passion would be tempered by prudence. Then, having finally acquired some common sense, he might at last behave properly, and demonstrate sensibility, modesty and a modicum of refinement.107 Bidloo also clashed with Willem III’s personal physicians in England, who had severely criticized him after the king’s death in 1702. By the time he returned to Leiden, Bidloo had exhausted his credit. He published an essay in which he contested the existence of Galen’s spiritus animalis, but a Swedish student reported that no one subscribed to his views. Bidloo, he insisted, did see spiritus animales, whenever he was in his cups.108 When Bidloo complained in December 1705 that he had been unable to give a public anatomy lesson because his place in the anatomical theatre had been usurped by Johann Rau, no one took him seriously. For years he had used the lack of corpses as an excuse for not giving anatomical demonstrations, but now that Rau was threatening to take over his position, he suddenly announced his intention to perform a public dissection. On 17 December he informed the university governors that he ‘had seen this morning, to his great

107 See Vasbinder, Govard Bidloo. In 1700 Bidloo published Gulielmus Cowper criminis literarii citatus coram Tribunali Nobiliss. Ampliss. Societatis Brittano Regiae. He asked Sloane for a verdict from the Royal Society, but Sloane replied ‘that the Society are not erected for determining controversies, but promoting naturall and experimentall knowledge’ (Weld, History, 352). 108 Johan Moraeus to E. Benzelius; see Wrangel, Betrekkingen, 273.

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surprise, affixed to the door of “the Anatomy”, a notice posted by Dr Johann Rau’, inviting everyone to attend his demonstration the following Saturday. Bidloo suggested that Rau give his lessons either in the dissecting room of the surgeons’ guild or at the hospital, but this had no effect on the board’s decision to let Rau use the anatomical theatre.109 The strained relations between Rau and Ruysch persisted, despite their having a mutual opponent. Ulhoorn, who studied with both of them, later reported that ‘they disagreed most of the time, and were uncompromising towards one another’. In Ulhoorn’s view, the only thing the two men had in common was their love of money. To be sure, both Ruysch and Rau had a businesslike attitude, and Rau even had a reputation for being mean and grasping. There was certainly a financial undercurrent to their conflict, but it was not as though they used their earnings to line their own pockets or enhance their social standing. Rather, they needed money to finance the work on which their reputations rested. Rau, moreover, thought he was as deserving as Ruysch, even though he came from a less genteel family. Otherwise their conflict was mainly a personality clash. Ulhoorn, who also saw it this way, said that Rau could sometimes be blunt and shorttempered, but he was, above all, direct and straightforward, whereas Ruysch was ‘reticent and jealous’ and afraid of losing his position. ‘Whenever the powerful J.J. Rau demonstrated his great talents in public here in this city, it happened more to the tireless Ruysch’s displeasure than to his satisfaction’, said Ulhoorn, who had seen for himself that Ruysch ‘was unable to rid himself of the fear that he would witness the dimming of his ancient lights’.110

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Molhuysen, Bronnen IV, 221–222. Ulhoorn, Tweede vertoog, 358.

CHAPTER SIX

THE COLLECTION Frederik Ruysch’s new technique enabled him to work more efficiently and to make better and more beautiful preparations. This prompted him to reorganize his museum, and in doing so, he concentrated more than ever before on the presentation. He distributed his collection over five rooms, containing cabinets of various sizes. Three rooms were reserved for the anatomical collection. As in the past, the arrangement was not systematic: Ruysch turned every cabinet into an individual work of art—a thesaurus, or storehouse of knowledge—consisting of sundry preparations in unique combinations. The centrepiece of every cabinet was an anatomical still life placed on a bed of bladder-, kidney- and gall-stones, from the midst of which rose ‘trees’ of dried blood vessels filled with a red, wax-like substance. Among these stood tiny foetal skeletons intended to symbolize human mortality. To some extent this manner of presentation was similar to what other collectors did when they coated shells with lacquer and arranged them in clever patterns, or piled up minerals to form a pyramid, in an attempt to make their collections more attractive. But to present anatomical material in this way was entirely new and different. Ruysch now had many more wet preparations on display. The shelves of his cabinets were full of large bottles and glass jars, in which his specimens swam in an alcohol-based liquid. This manner of presentation was rather unusual, if only because it cost a fortune in alcohol and glass. Ruysch used liquid that was exceptionally clear, and by suspending the body parts on horse hairs, he could let them hang freely, so that they were visible from all sides. He smeared resin on the upper edge of the jars before sealing them with pig’s bladders, thus preventing evaporation and ensuring preservation. As he told visitors, Ruysch used other body parts as well to cover his jars: intestines, for example, and human skin. All of these ‘lids’ were a decorative red colour, because the blood vessels had been injected with red wax. ‘This is not only pleasing to the eye’, Ruysch maintained, ‘but useful as well, to those who wish to observe the precise course of

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these arteries.’1 Sometimes he tied a red velvet ribbon around the top as a finishing touch. The emphasis thus lay on Ruysch’s handiwork, his skill, his ‘art’. Although the collection reflected his search for answers to scientific questions—and could be used to answer such questions, at least when Ruysch could find the preparation he was looking for—it was largely an end in itself. Ruysch did not order his work according to specifically formulated problems, as Harvey did. Instead, he confined himself to cataloguing his collection and recording the observations his injections had enabled him to make. His work was the product of labourintensive and technically very adept handiwork, and he did not want this to go unnoticed. He often pointed out how fresh his specimens looked, how much time and effort had gone into them, and how beautiful they had turned out. Capriccio Anatomico Ruysch decided to catalogue his reorganized collection cabinet by cabinet, starting with the first room on the ground floor. He began each thesaurus with the lowest shelf and worked his way up, describing the objects one by one, sometimes with commentary, occasionally with longer reflections, now and then with added illustrations. In his 1690 catalogue, Ruysch had used his own drawings, but now he commissioned professional draughtsmen to illustrate his new catalogue. Most of the illustrations were made by Cornelis Huyberts, a young man from Emmerich who had been working in Amsterdam since 1689, but Ruysch also commissioned drawings from the somewhat older Josef Mulder, who had received his training as a draughtsman and etcher in Amsterdam. The catalogue of the contents of the first cabinet—Het eerste anatomische cabinet, published in 1701—contained an illustration of the cabinet’s centrepiece.2 Its base was formed by a walnut pedestal with an artificial rock, composed of bladder-, kidney- and gall-stones, a few of which had been removed from an eighty-year-old woman whose condition Ruysch described in his observations. Some of the other stones had been passed in the urine or removed by stone-cutters or 1 2

AW (Frederik Ruysch, Alle de Werken) 497. AW 490–521.

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Fig. 29 Frontispiece of Alle de ontleed-, genees- en heelkundige werken, executed by Cornelis Huijberts, showing an idealized museum interior. The large room in Ruysch’s house on the Bloemgracht was smaller, but various elements of his collection can be identified: a cabinet full of glass jars and the compositions standing on pedestals and gracing lids, as well as a pipa, butterflies and framed flowers.

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taken out of corpses by Ruysch himself. One of them had even been coughed up by a man with a long history of difficulty in swallowing. Two large stones had come from the breast of a very old woman, and another specimen had obstructed the urinary duct of a four-year-old girl, causing her death. Ruysch could not help but be moved at the thought of all the pain the little girl must have endured. Among the stones, Ruysch had placed, by way of vegetation, various branches of vessels. Atop the rock stood the skeleton of a four-month foetus, holding in its right hand a string of pearls and seeming to ask: ‘Why should I care about earthly things?’ To the right of the rock, another skeleton of a four-month foetus stood on a pedestal. That Ruysch was able to assemble such small skeletons at all was remarkable, but even more amazing was the skill with which he manipulated them. Fastened to the right hand of this skeleton was a hair on which hung chalk-like stones from the joints of an old woman plagued by gout. In its left hand, the foetal skeleton held to its eye socket a handkerchief— actually a thin membrane displaying thousands of arteries—as though tearfully expressing the miseries of mankind. To the left of the rock stood a third skeleton, again of a four-month foetus, holding a scythe in its right hand. These two skeletons were accompanied by vanitas mottos: ‘Man, born of woman, lives but briefly and has many weaknesses’ and ‘Death spares no one, not even defenceless babes’. On a walnut pedestal opposite the rock stood bronchial tubes, at the front the bronchus of a calf, which had been injected with a red, waxy substance and placed in such a way as to resemble a leafless tree. Ruysch told visitors that his method of drying allowed the branches of the bronchi to retain their natural shape. To demonstrate his new, improved methods, he added to the display an old preparation, the bronchus of a calf, which he had prepared and preserved more than three decades earlier. In the middle of the central pedestal stood a smaller base with two skeletons, one of which—owing to Ruysch’s positioning skills— appeared to be laughing. The other skeleton held a membranous handkerchief to its eye socket and seemed to be crying. Ruysch called the pair Democritus and Heraclitus, after the classical philosophers who represented opposing world views, with Heraclitus on the side of the Aristotelians and Democritus in the Cartesian camp. Indeed, Ruysch might very well have been referring to the philosophical struggle that had dominated science in recent decades. Then again, the contrast between Democritus and Heraclitus was a formula used by many poets

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and painters. The writer Gerard Brandt was prompted by a painting of these two philosophers to comment on the fragility of earthly existence: ‘We see your false dissembling and your vanities galore, which Democritus scoffed at but Heraclitus deplored.’3 Ruysch’s Heraclitus lamented the fact that he had been robbed of life and ‘torn from the breast’, but laughing Democritus rejoiced in his deliverance from all the misery mankind was forced to endure. Ruysch drew visitors’ attention to Heraclitus’ handkerchief, and pointed out that it was made of an extremely thin membrane filled with countless red arteries that ‘look very much like a real piece of embroidery, of which the prophet David speaks in Psalm 139’.4 Standing on a pedestal between the two compositions was the skeleton of a girl of three or four. Ruysch drew attention to the extreme whiteness of the bones, as well as to the special manner of their preparation, for all the parts were joined by their natural ligaments. Again, Ruysch had injected those ligaments with a red, wax-like substance: ‘If we look at these ligaments with a magnifying glass, we see not only the capillary branches of the arteries, but also those that are much, much finer.’ In its left hand the skeleton held an injected spleen artery, turned towards its breast; from its right hand dangled a silk thread with a heart attached to it, to visualize the motto ‘all things human hang by a slender thread’, the line from Ovid that Ruysch had already portrayed in the first arrangement of his museum.5 Clearly, Ruysch was in his element when creating such compositions, which made a deep impression on visitors to his museum. Indeed, they inspired Johannes Brandt, a Remonstrant teacher, to write the following verse: Oh, what are we? What remains of us when we are dead? Behold, it is no living thing, but dry, bare bone instead. Bladder stones you see in heaps, piled higher by the morrow: Here one learns about life’s course through storms of pain and sorrow. These wise lessons Ruysch presents with wit and erudition, Amsterdam is fortunate to have this great physician.6

3

Brandt, Poëzy III, 331. The Dutch translation of this psalm contains a phrase, added here in italics, which is not in the King James version: ‘My substance was not hid from thee, when I was made in secret, and curiously wrought like an embroidery in the lowest parts of the earth’ (Psalm 139:15). 5 ‘Omnia sunt hominum tenui pendentia filo’ (Ovid, Epistulae ex Ponto IV 3.35). 6 AW 566. 4

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Another composition featured three tiny skeletons playing musical instruments. Again, the poses and attributes of the trio were rich in symbolism. The one in the middle held, by way of a violin, a piece of damaged thighbone, seemingly bent on expressing the miseries of the human condition. The second skeleton beat time with a stick that also seemed to be pointing to its head. Perhaps this was Ruysch’s way of suggesting the fallacy of believing, as some anatomists did, that the bones of a foetus were cartilaginous.7 Such combinations of seriousness and humour fit in with a longstanding tradition. Sixteenth-century publications abounded in illustrations of skeletons using bones as drumsticks and other such instruments. In a way, Ruysch’s compositions were subtle, threedimensional versions of those anatomical illustrations showing skeletons in dramatic poses placed in curious settings. Numerous publications on anatomy—the atlas of Vesalius, for example—contained pictures of skeletons whose gestures indicated certain dispositions or walks of life: skeletons were portrayed as gravediggers, for instance, or hanged criminals. But to present skeletons as characters in a tableau non vivant was highly unusual, and an indication of the extent to which Ruysch had distanced himself from his material. In one of his compositions a skeleton says: ‘I’m still attractive even after death!’8 In addition to numerous shelves and boxes of bones and preserved organs, Ruysch showed his visitors hundreds of glass jars containing children’s body parts: hands, feet, heads and sometimes entire bodies. Often their fingernails were painted black, and their heads sported caps and sometimes glass eyes. One head in particular had a rosy complexion that Ruysch never failed to point out. Using no cosmetics whatsoever, Ruysch had prepared it so skilfully that it seemed to be the head of a sleeping child.9 The foetuses and body parts preserved in spirits were adorned with collars, cuffs and armbands, primarily intended to conceal scars and stitches, as Ruysch explained in the case of a bottle containing a child’s arm: ‘The cotton ornaments and frills adorning the arm serve the following purpose: first, to cover the wound caused by amputating the arm, and second, to embellish the subject itself.’ Satisfied with the

7 8 9

AW 566–568. AW 611. See AW 530.

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Anatomical composition from Het eerste anatomische cabinet of Frederik Ruysch, illustrated by Cornelis Huijberts (1701).

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Fig. 31

Eyelids and child’s arm (Rosamond Purcell).

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Child’s head in a glass jar (Rosamond Purcell).

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effect he had created, Ruysch began to fill bottles with wet compositions. In one bottle he laid a four-month foetus on a placenta instead of a pillow, and in another he placed a foetus, adorned with cap and collar, in a nest of blood vessels.10 As he did with his dry preparations, Ruysch gave free rein to his imagination. He put an embryo in the mouth of an African snake, for example, and in the hand of a child (whose arm had been amputated below the elbow), he placed an egg from which a tortoise was emerging.11 Whether his material was human, animal or vegetable, Ruysch found it all equally splendid and was intent on exhibiting as much of it as possible. He maintained that he was merely gratifying the desire to observe the miracles of God Almighty, but in fact his motivation was twofold: not only did he exalt the human anatomy as a wondrous product of Creation, but he presented himself as a veritable artist of death. This display of his anatomical virtuosity contained the veiled message that he—and he alone—was able to defy death to the extent that he could make a corpse look like a living body. Ruysch always emphasized the natural form, colour and flexibility of his prepared bodies, which differed from live ones only in their lack of movement. He was convinced that his art had given him knowledge—and therefore a special status—that others would never be able to attain. This explains both his irritation at those who professed to be his peers and his reluctance to divulge his working methods, for it was only by maintaining strict secrecy that he could remain the sole intermediary between the living and the dead. Throughout this period Ruysch continued to give anatomical demonstrations. In the summer of 1703, he issued printed announcements of a public dissection he planned to perform in the anatomical theatre: ‘As it is my custom to give a public anatomy lesson once or twice a year, and it has been a whole year since I have had the opportunity to perform a dissection on a fresh corpse, it is my intention to begin, on the first Tuesday of the month of August, a public anatomy lesson at the Theatrum Anatomicum, using the bodies of three youths who died about ten years ago and were dissected in public in July 1695 and October 1696.’12 These bodies had not only been restored to a natural-looking, lifelike state, but had even improved in appearance.

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AW 586. AW 612. AW 660.

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The first body seemed exactly like ‘a sleeping boy, handsome and fair of face . . . It is my intention to exhibit this body fully dressed, as I usually do, without dissecting it, thus preserving it intact.’ The second body had been publicly dissected in 1695 and 1696. ‘The third I dissected in a way that enabled me to show everything separately’, Ruysch said, so that each body part could be passed along to those standing at some distance from the dissecting table. The spectators would notice that in these prepared bodies each part could be seen ‘much more clearly, distinctly and neatly than is possible in a fresh corpse’. After all, it was known that ‘everything in a person’s appearance that is pleasing to the eye is taken away by death and changed in essence’, and the same was true of the internal organs. But Ruysch’s new method restored corpses to their natural form, so that they were indistinguishable from sleeping people. The limbs and members that were otherwise stiff were now as easy to move as in a living person, and they did not have the unpleasant odour that corpses normally had. ‘In this anatomical lecture it is not my intention to show things in the customary order, but to consider it a sequel to my previous anatomical demonstrations’, Ruysch explained. He planned to talk about breasts, prepared specimens of which he would bring along, and about the extreme ends of blood vessels. He would prove that the liver and spleen did not consist of glands, and he intended ‘to combine these demonstrations with some surgical interventions; among other things, we shall mend a broken leg’. Additionally, he would show several peculiarities of bone diseases. The demonstrations would be given on Tuesdays and Fridays, in Dutch and in Latin, the whole course lasting several weeks. Specimens Ruysch definitely appealed to the emotions, both in his anatomical demonstrations and in his museum displays, but his aim was not to sensationalize. Those in search of thrills and horror had to go elsewhere. The attraction exerted by horrific scenes was apparent from the great interest taken in public executions, and the need to feel shock and revulsion was undoubtedly one of the motives for attending anatomical demonstrations. Bizarre deformities were big attractions at the annual fairs, and sometimes served as eye-catchers in anatomical

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collections. Ruysch, however, did not stoop to such measures. Though he possessed all manner of natural curiosities, he did not make a point of exhibiting them unless he thought they served an educational purpose, as in the case of the whore whose bones had been weakened by syphilis. In fact, he was generally reluctant to display deformities and morbid aberrations. Objects ‘unnatural in appearance’ were shown only on request, for his anatomical installations were meant to be pleasing to the eye and to make a visit to his collection a pleasant experience. This was not the case with some of the other anatomical museums, which exhibited objects that, in Ruysch’s view, should have been buried rather than put on display.13 He placed the head of a black baby scarred by smallpox behind an array of injected arteries, to make it less repugnant.14 A ‘monstrous’ baby with no left leg and a crooked right hand, three fingers, three toes and a growth on its abdomen was displayed in a bottle, hidden behind intestines filled with white wax, ‘so as not to be seen by everyone’.15 Ruysch was, in fact, interested in freaks of nature, which he also collected, since deformities had long been a matter of scientific interest. Deformed children were sometimes seen as bad omens, or as God’s punishment for the parents’ sins, the nature of the deformity being related to the nature of the sin. More often than not, though, explanations were sought in natural influences rather than divine retribution. It was generally assumed that the mother’s fantasies could affect the embryo. While Ruysch thought it possible that the mother’s mental state could exert an influence on foetal development, he was more inclined to believe that deformities were caused by a malfunction in the growth process. He preserved a baby born three months prematurely with a head much larger than the rest of its body. The women present at the birth had summoned Ruysch when things started to go wrong, but the child, apparently afflicted with hydrocephalus, was born before he arrived. And the story did not end there, for when the midwife removed the afterbirth, she noticed that the womb was not yet empty. Ruysch watched as she pulled out an exceptionally odd agglomeration consisting of a foot, some bones, and several unconnected body parts. Ruysch asked if he could have them, but the family

13 14 15

AW 691. AW 726. AW 754.

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Fig. 34 Child’s head from the collection of the Kunstkamera in St Petersburg (Rosamond Purcell).

initially refused. When at last they gave him permission to keep the strange specimens, he was sorry to see that the bones had been damaged by rough treatment. Searching for an explanation for the malformed mass, he imagined that at the time of conception, various eggs had been impregnated, and had become jumbled as they moved through the Fallopian tubes into the cavity of the womb.16 Ruysch had also preserved a creature whose death he considered a blessing, because the arms, hands and feet had grown grotesquely entwined, and if it had survived, the child would have led a miserable life.17 The anatomist Dirk Kerkrinck had discussed deformities in a publication that appeared in 1670. At the time Ruysch had supplied him with material, including the skeleton of a child with too many fingers and toes, and a premature baby whose skull was a solid, brainless mass.18 Having received two more such corpses, Ruysch preserved one in spirits and the other as a skeleton. Since the early years of his 16 17 18

AW 539–541. AW 692. See AW 720, 741.

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museum, Ruysch had kept two embalmed premature babies attached at the abdomen.19 He had been given permission to keep them, provided the parents (and their friends) could come and see them as often as they liked. It was not always easy to reach such agreements. Usually one had to pay for rarities, as Ruysch did in the case of a premature baby with two heads.20 The owners of bizarre specimens were often completely uninterested in their scientific value, and simply demanded whatever amount they thought they could get. Ruysch was not always willing to pay the asking price. Once, when offered a sheep whose liver contained five gall-bladders, he confined himself to studying the phenomenon. ‘I examined it when it was brought to me, but I refused to buy it’, he noted, ‘because of the unreasonably high price demanded for it.’ Ruysch did enlarge his collection, however, with a small four-footed animal that had been regurgitated by a seventy-eight-year-old woman. It looked like a tiny dog, enclosed in a pouch rather than membranes. The creature was presented to Ruysch, who asked the giver to describe the circumstances surrounding this mystery. It appeared to concern Grietje Willems, wife of the fishmonger Adriaan Leeuw, who recounted that she had nearly suffocated when vomiting up the thing. Ruysch did not think they had invented the story, because they wanted no money for the specimen and there were credible witnesses to the event.21 Most natural rarities were more unusual than gruesome. Many of Ruysch’s specimens were special only because of the stories he told about them. He saved, for example, a sheep’s plexus choroideus— brain tissue rich in blood vessels—because in this case the vessels had changed into vesicles (blisters). That was indeed strange, but Ruysch found it interesting mainly because of the effect it had had on the animal: ‘This sheep, seemingly robbed of its senses, walked into a wall and then into the water, not knowing what it was doing.’ While examining the sheep’s brain, he recalled cutting open the body of a dead man whose plexus choroideus had also deteriorated.22 He thus concluded that blood vessels could degenerate—presumably through blockage— and become vesicles that caused the relevant body part to malfunction. Hendrik Ruysch gave a succinct explanation of the phenomenon: 19 20 21 22

AW 956. AW 720. AW 794. AW 731.

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‘We have discovered that when the plexus choroideus consisted of vesicles, the creature in question—whether a human being or a fourfooted animal—ran mad.’23 Ruysch had known a man who suffered from delusions. Though wealthy, he complained continually that he was as poor as a church mouse. ‘When he died’, Ruysch said, ‘I opened up his head in the presence of some of his relatives, as well as my son, and found that the plexus was filled with countless vesicles.’ He had observed that by the time the fissures between the convolutions of the brain had filled with an overabundance of fluid, the patient had run partly or entirely mad and become ‘slow, stupid and incapable of practising his profession’. He tentatively attributed this condition to a ‘weakening of the animal spirits in the stagnant fluid’. Clearly, an excess of fluid in the brain was unhealthy, but a lack of fluid was not good either, because some amount was necessary ‘to irrigate the brain system’. An excess of fluid was not a problem that confined itself to the brain. By way of analogy, Ruysch argued that an excess of blood could also cause serious illness. Some maintained that there was no such thing as too much blood, but it was obvious to everyone that an excess of other fluids could be very bothersome indeed: excess milk in the female breast, for example, caused painful swelling and inflammation, and then there were the troubles caused by the male sperm: ‘The complaints caused in men by excess sperm are well known to medical practitioners’, declared Ruysch, who had filled a cabinet with ‘human ailments’. In addition to the vesicle-ridden plexus choroideus, he preserved a similarly degenerated placenta.24 In his search for the causes of ailments and deformities, Ruysch also encountered hermaphrodites, who—like giants, dwarfs and Siamese twins—were exhibited all over the country at markets and fairs. In Ruysch’s opinion, however, hermaphrodites did not exist. He, at any rate, had never seen one, and he doubted that anyone else had either. Sexual dualism, it seemed to him, was not at all what nature intended. He had often been shown a so-called she-man, who on closer inspection invariably proved to be a woman: ‘The member they had taken to be a penis was nothing but the clitoris, unnaturally thickened and hanging far outside the vagina.’ He concluded that a twenty-four-year-old

23 24

Note in Portal, Practijk, 184 (Amsterdam University Library, MS XXI C 18). AW 356–357.

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Hand holding vulva, from the collection of Leiden University (Rosamond Purcell).

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‘hermaphrodite’ was female after his examination revealed the lack of a urinary passage in the male member. ‘She said that when she gazed at the face of a beautiful woman the member grew stiff’, Ruysch recounted, but he had doubted the truthfulness of her statement, and his scepticism was borne out by his subsequent examination. In his experience, animals that bore the characteristics of both sexes never proved to be both male and female. A butcher’s servant had once brought Ruysch a female sheep with testicles, which, on closer inspection, turned out to be growths.25 In the spring of 1706 the body of a female giant was put at the disposal of the surgeons’ guild. Before Ruysch dissected it, he sent the surgeons Dirk Cloes and Abel Horst to persuade the Collegium Medicum to invite the midwives as well. Ruysch wanted the midwives to be present because the giant’s organs were so large that they would be able to see their structure much better. This proved to be true, and it was not only the midwives who profited, but Ruysch as well. The largeness of the spleen made it perfectly clear that nothing like a gland, fibre or membrane was to be found in the human spleen. The plexus choroideus, on the other hand, appeared to be very fragile compared to the rest of the body. Ruysch kept the giant’s spleen, stomach and appendix, and her skeleton went to the guild.26 In mid-November the officers summoned the guild-brothers to the Weigh House to start assembling the giantess.27 Her skeleton was installed in the guildhall, where five years later a German traveller saw it, but by then it had been shrouded by a curtain.28 Animals One of Ruysch’s cabinets contained a rat with human organs in its jaws. This rat had once played a leading role in an anatomy lesson at which Ruysch intended to show the arm muscles. Ruysch had prepared the corpse the evening before and covered it with a cloth before leaving, but the next morning the body was no longer in the same

25

AW 755–756. See also AW 956. AW 723, 726, 728, 803. 27 Amsterdam City Archives, surgeons’ guild archive 214; Collegium Medicum archive 2. 28 Uffenbach, Merkwürdige Reisen III, 639. 26

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Fig. 36 Child’s lower leg and a scorpion, before (p. 286) and after (p. 287) the conservation treatment carried out in St Petersburg (Willem J. Mulder).

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condition: ‘When I removed the cloth from the cadaver, it appeared that this rat had not only torn up and eaten the prepared muscles, but had also taken a large bite out of the cheek.’ Ruysch abandoned his original plans and improvised the lesson: he had someone catch the rat, which he then dissected in the presence of the public. Afterwards he embalmed the animal and exhibited it among his anatomical preparations.29 Ruysch not only used animals as frivolous additions to his anatomical preparations, but also displayed them on their own. Some of his cabinets of anatomical specimens had a drawer full of insects, but there were also cabinets filled with nothing but animals. He expressed a desire to compile a descriptive inventory of his animal collection, but his acquaintances urged him to finish cataloguing the anatomical collection before embarking on another project. That collection was more important, and it was to be hoped that, despite his advancing years, he would be able to finish the catalogue.30 Ruysch himself acknowledged that he was getting old. The descriptions of some of the objects in his anatomical cabinet included remarks to the effect that certain details could be seen more clearly under a magnifying glass and that the need for this instrument was no doubt due to his age.31 His eyes were certainly not what they used to be. Much of his work was carried out by candlelight, and Ruysch had not spared his eyes in the least. When he was criticized for pursuing his interest in animals (as though he were neglecting his duties as professor of anatomy and botany), Ruysch justified his animal collection by pointing out that it benefited his study of the human anatomy, but he subsequently resolved to focus on completing the catalogue of his anatomical collection.32 In 1710 Ruysch finally drew up an inventory of one cabinet of animal specimens. Describing them all would have been a hopeless task in any case, for he had boxes and boxes filled with unsorted butterflies, grasshoppers and other insects, most of which had come from Asia and South America. Because Ruysch had suppliers in those parts of the world, he was continually approached by collectors in search of

29 30 31 32

AW 616, 679. AW 537. AW 703. AW 1069.

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Fig. 37 Depiction of decorated glass jars from Het eerste cabinet der dieren. The jar on the left, which is filled with fluid, contains an armadillo the size of a little finger, with a twig of ficoides—displaying short, thick, thorny leaves—from the Cape of Good Hope. A bouquet of flowers decorates the lid. The jar on the right contains a bird from Ceylon, perched on a thistle. It is a dry preparation. D marks a colourful butterfly from Turkey.

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interesting specimens.33 Insects, particularly butterflies, were popular collector’s items, and Ruysch’s collection of butterflies was one of the largest in Amsterdam. One admirer of that collection was Maria Sibylla Merian, a German woman in her forties, whose speciality was the depiction of insects. For years she had lived with a religious sect in Friesland, but when the sect broke up in 1691, she and her two daughters had moved to Amsterdam. Her father, a highly respected engraver and publisher in Frankfurt, had died when Maria was a little girl, so she had been taught to draw, paint and engrave by her stepfather, Jacob Morell, who had mastered the art of flower painting in Utrecht. Morell also took a great interest in insects, which he collected in his studio in Frankfurt. Maria found insects so fascinating that she took lessons in Latin to enable her to read the writings of natural scientists. She made watercolours of flowers and insects, and in 1679 even published a book on caterpillars that included fifty autograph engravings. Maria’s fascination for insects continued unabated, and now, in Amsterdam, a world opened up for her. ‘In Holland I gazed with astonishment at all the beautiful creatures sent from the East and West Indies.’ Impressed by Frederik Ruysch’s collection, she wrote to a German acquaintance, describing Ruysch’s method of preserving the little creatures: ‘Such animals are put in glass jars with common spirits . . . and they keep well.’ They could also be dried and kept in a box, she said, in which case it was advisable to use oil of lavender, to prevent them from being eaten by worms.34 To earn a living, Maria Sibylla Merian made watercolours of such objects as the plants cultivated by the plant fancier Agneta Block. But Maria’s true interest lay in insects. She determined to find out every thing she could about caterpillars, and the prospect of learning how caterpillars become pupae and continue to metamorphose prompted her to undertake an extensive and costly voyage to Surinam (Dutch Guiana) in South America. To finance her journey, she placed an advertisement in the Amsterdamsche Courant, offering work she described as both artful and scientific. She advertised 253 sheets—

33 One of his contacts overseas was the physician Willem ten Rhijne, a pupil of DeleBoë, who had left for Asia. Ruysch managed his affairs, together with the Deventer physician Caspar Sibelius (British Library, Sloane MS 2729). 34 Der Raupen wunderbare Verwandlung und sonderbare Blumennahrung (The wonderful metamorphosis of caterpillars and the floral nourishment peculiar to them). See Wettengl, Merian.

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Fig. 38 Depiction of decorated glass jars from Het eerste cabinet der dieren. Engraving by Josef Mulder, 1710. The jar on the left contains a fish caught near Ceylon (A) and a sea nettle (B). The composition decorating the lid features a Moluccan fish (E). The jar on the right contains part of a child’s arm. The hand holds an egg, from which emerge the head and front flippers of a young sea turtle. The composition on the lid features a fish caught near the Molucca Islands. It is described as ‘a flying fish, bony and knobbly with a saw-like mouth’.

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folio-size watercolours on parchment—which she had produced in the course of thirty years at great effort and expense. After making her will, she left in June 1699 for Surinam, together with Dorothea, the younger of her two daughters.35 Frederik Ruysch continued as usual to study exotic animals in Amsterdam. In addition to insects, he mainly collected rare birds, fish and reptiles. As items of special interest, he preserved body parts of whales, an elephant’s tooth with a brass bullet lodged in it, and the head of what he called ‘an American quast’—quast means ‘brush’ in Dutch, so he might have been referring to a porcupine or hedgehog— which he had acquired while it was still alive.36 A striking component of his collection was a box of very small flies which a ‘distinguished gentleman’ had passed in his urine. Ruysch thought that little worms had penetrated the urethra as far as the head of the bladder, and considered it likely that such a thing could occur while sitting on the privy, ‘particularly if one tends to stay there a long time’. Ruysch’s animal collection—which filled numerous boxes and cupboards, not to mention 1,500 bottles—was used by his son Hendrik in 1718 for a new edition of Jan Jonston’s Theatrum Animalium. Jonston, who had died in 1675, was a Polish physician of Scottish descent who had studied in Leiden. His encyclopaedia, a compilation of everything known about animals, had been published in six volumes in the years 1650–1653.37 In 1660 the Dutch translation appeared in Amsterdam as Theatrum universale of Algemene Schouwburg der Dieren (Theatrum universale or General Theatre of Animals) with 1,800 folio pages and 250 copper engravings. Hendrik Ruysch updated a volume and prefaced it with a description and illustrations of his own collection of Indian fish. Wonders Frederik Ruysch had designed his cabinet of animals in the same exuberant way as his anatomical cabinets. Not only were the bottles sealed 35

Amsterdam City Archives, notary Samuel Wijmer, 23 April 1699. AW 846, 874, 875, 896, 791. 37 It was mainly a recapitulation of the sixteenth-century encyclopaedic works of Conrad Gesner and Ulysses Aldrovandi, and most of the illustrations—made by a brother-in-law of Maria Sybilla Merian—were based on the illustrations in those earlier works. 36

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with bladders and decorated with red velvet ribbons, but their lids were adorned with bouquets of rare flowers and rock formations composed of shells interspersed with pieces of coral. Sometimes Ruysch added embalmed fish. The bouquets on the lids contained herbs and seeds, as well as butterflies and other insects that naturally fed on the vegetation surrounding them. Such compositions, which gave the collection a pleasing appearance, were also a useful way of combining specimens to make optimal use of the available space. The museum’s design had thus been born of necessity. Combining objects was a space-saving expedient, and the frills adorning them served to disguise their more unpleasant aspects. Ruysch, always the frugal one, utilized every bit of his material. He used membranes and patches of skin to seal the glass jars in which he kept his wet preparations, sometimes adding a twig from an orange tree to hold the specimen in place, so that it remained clearly visible and did not sink to the bottom of the jar. ‘Anything that wants to live with me has to be active, not idle’, he said, not without irony. He took pleasure in thinking up new uses for his material: human shinbones, for example, served as handles for a knife and fork, which were then kept in a sheath made out of a child’s skin, rather than the more usual sharkskin. ‘When I tanned the child’s skin, converting it into leather, I had to handle it very carefully’, Ruysch said, explaining that he had to ensure that the red substance he injected would remain in the blood vessels.38 From human skin he also manufactured a pair of slippers, a banner, and a breastplate with a visible brand-mark (having been the skin of a thief). From the skin of a child’s head he made a cap. As a special attraction he removed and prepared the two upper layers of skin from the hand of a premature baby, turning them into a glove with nails. ‘This object is so beautiful that it catches the eye of every visitor’, he said with pride.39 No one had ever succeeded in studying all five rooms of Ruysch’s collection. He suggested that those determined to see everything come twice a week, at a time that suited him, to get the benefit of his commentary. As far as his fee was concerned, he would consider such a visit the equivalent of a doctor’s visit. He also announced his intention to give private lessons at his home, throughout the year, every

38 39

AW 596, 781, 789. AW 224, 624, 852, 870, 917, 918.

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day from 11.30 a.m. to 2 p.m. In the course of these lessons he would discuss and demonstrate every part of the human body. This was facilitated by his new methods, for body parts kept in his clear preservative fluid were easier to view than embalmed specimens. Each part of the body would be discussed briefly and then shown in its natural place in a corpse, and dissections would be performed for those who wanted to see the practical side of his work. Ruysch estimated that it would take him four or five weeks to show interested parties the contents of his sixteen anatomical cabinets. Those who had more time would then be shown the animals and shells. In 1705 Ruysch tried out this plan with a few particularly keen students. He intended to show them his entire collection in three months, by spending an hour a day with them, but even though they daily devoted more than the allotted hour to their anatomical studies, they never got past the first room. ‘It is true that we did not hurry through it, because we viewed each object carefully, as is only proper’, Ruysch admitted. Viewing the collection in its entirety, however, was evidently impossible.40 The museum was a monument in the eyes of the publisher François Halma, whose visit to the collection prompted him to write a poem in Ruysch’s guestbook.41 To the great nature cabinet of Mr Frederik Ruysch, renowned professor of anatomy and botany, and physician in Amsterdam: Who would not show due respect on seeing your collection? O great anatomist! A thousand wonders greet our sight, These countless human body parts! Oh, who would not delight In viewing objects that would even draw the close attention Of all the muses and the gods of art? My song nymph asks: Who indeed appreciates your work and good intentions? Who understands the value of the methods and inventions, On which you lavished forty years (ne’er tiring of your tasks)? Incessantly you garnered treasures with the greatest care, For which you wear Apollo’s wreath upon your silver hair.

40

AW 658, 1258. Duverney did succeed in doing this. He showed two English students all the parts of the body in the space of three months (according to Lister, A Journey to Paris, 67). 41 Amsterdam University Library, MS I E 20.

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The Republic of Letters As a scientist and a collector, Frederik Ruysch belonged to the Republic of Letters, as the international scientific community was generally referred to in the early-modern period. The aim of its members (often called ‘curieux’, ‘amateurs’ or ‘virtuosi’) was to exchange findings with a view to approaching a true understanding of the world. In theory, all members were equal. It did not matter whether one was a professor, clergyman, lawyer, doctor, apothecary or even a mere merchant. The important thing was one’s contribution and the collective goal: to learn as much as possible about the world. The lingua franca was Latin, classical culture still being the framework in which scholars communicated. The same principles obtained as in regular social intercourse. Knowledge was seldom imparted in a wholly disinterested way. Scholars, too, sought prestige, power, wealth and fame, and there were differences of opinion and vested interests to contend with. The scholarly arena was crowded with talented young people who did not shrink from attacking the authorities in their field. Together with patronage-seekers, Utopians, swindlers and genuine enthusiasts, they formed a lively circuit in which Ruysch also participated, although he seldom left Amsterdam. Many scientists undertook journeys to meet other men of learning, but Ruysch refused to travel. He communicated with others by exchanging letters, books, drawings and anatomical specimens. Those who wanted to meet him had to go to Amsterdam. Scholars also learned about one another’s work through their writings. Ruysch’s contribution to the written medium included his observations and letters, which had appeared in Latin, so that foreigners, too, could read them. He had also published a catalogue of his collection. The publication of his thesauri (the Latin version of the catalogues of his anatomical cabinets) enhanced his reputation abroad. In Paris his work was read with great interest, and from time to time a member of the Académie des Sciences was charged with the task of verifying one of Ruysch’s assertions. In 1699 he was approached by the celebrated anatomist Joseph Duverney to become a ‘correspondent’ of the Académie. Duverney was extremely interested in Ruysch’s preparation technique. In that same year Hans Sloane, a famous English collector, expressed an interest in Ruysch’s collection of butterflies. Sloane, secretary of the Royal Society since 1693, had written to Ruysch in English, but Ruysch replied that he did not speak the language. Besides Dutch, he could write only in Latin and, with some

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difficulty, in French. In those days there were very few Dutch people who could speak or write English, but it was not too difficult to find someone who had a working knowledge of the language, so Ruysch was able to inform Sloane that his son Hendrik would send the Indian butterflies he had requested.42 Ruysch had long been a renowned anatomist, but his international contacts had increased since his appointment as professor of botany at the Hortus. Botanists were often collectors, and a great many of them were physicians as well. Foreign botanists had initially been in contact mainly with the Leiden Hortus, but since the establishment of the Hortus in Amsterdam, relations had also been cultivated with the botanists there. William Sherard, who had visited Ruysch in the summer of 1697 and received some Asian plants from him, described Ruysch’s collection to his English friends, including Sloane and the London apothecary James Petiver, who seemed very interested indeed. Petiver had trained with the apothecary of Saint Bartholomew’s Hospital before setting up his own business ‘at the White Cross’ in Aldersgate Street. An obsessive collector, he had amassed an impressive and wide-ranging assortment of specimens, and had begun to publish a catalogue of his collection. He was not a great scholar, but thanks to Sloane he was elected to the Royal Society in 1695.43 Although the activities of the Royal Society had fallen off since its first heroic period, the society still had an illustrious name, and Sloane knew how to exploit it. He was not a brilliant scientist, but he had studied in France, and after voyaging to Jamaica, had become a successful upper-class doctor in Bloomsbury. His passion, however, was his collection. Like Ruysch, he had been interested in botany since his youth, and in addition to plants, he collected mainly naturalia. Both the Royal Society and his own collection benefited from the far-flung international network of scientists with whom he corresponded as secretary of the society.44

42 British Library, Sloane MS 4037, Ruysch to Sloane, 26 December 1699; see also Sloane MS 4063. 43 Raymond Stearns, Petiver’s biographer, described him as ‘vain, excessively ambitious, and occasionally dull’ (Petiver, 245). 44 The clergyman William Stukely declared: ‘Hans Sloane is an instance of the great power of industry which can advance a man to a considerable height in the world’s esteem with moderate parts & learning . . . He has no faculty of speaking, either fluently or eloquently, especially before any number of people, & he does it with great timidity.

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Sloane and Petiver had become good friends. Petiver already had correspondents in North America, Jamaica, Brazil, Barbados and the Bermudas, but now he was determined to contact the most important Amsterdam collectors, who had access to the Asian market. He first approached Johan Starrenburg, who held a government post at the Cape of Good Hope.45 Starrenburg put him in touch with the famous Amsterdam collector Levinus Vincent, to whom Petiver wrote in English. Vincent replied in Dutch, saying that no pursuit gave him as much pleasure as viewing objects he had never seen before. He was delighted with the interest taken by the English in his collection. He had heard of Petiver and seen the catalogue of his collection. Petiver, having asked if Vincent also had a catalogue, learned that he had a handwritten version, to which he continually made additions and improvements. Vincent told Petiver that some day there would be a printed edition for foreign visitors, and asked him to write in French the next time. When Petiver sent Vincent some butterflies, the latter responded by saying that he already had the specimens and that it was not customary in Holland to flatten butterflies. All the same, Vincent continued to cultivate relations with Petiver, if only because he hoped that Petiver might put him in touch with merchants who dealt in English cloth. Together with Maria Sibylla Merian, who had just returned from her overseas sojourn, Vincent sent Petiver insects from Surinam.46 Thanks to William Sherard’s introduction, Petiver had also come into contact with Frederik Ruysch, who informed him that he had sent three boxes of butterflies from the West Indies. When Petiver replied that he had not received them, Ruysch was baffled, because he had entrusted the boxes to a ‘gentleman’. In future he would be more careful in choosing his messengers. Petiver had also sent butterflies to Ruysch, who had been just as unenthusiastic as Vincent. Ruysch told Petiver that he did not need English butterflies, because they were no different from the Dutch varieties. He was, however, interested in American butterflies, but only if their wings were intact,

His most commendable quality is his love for natural learning, & the pains he takes to promote it’ (McGregor, Sir Hans Sloane, 18). 45 Starrenburg had been recruited for Petiver by the Scottish surgeon James Cunningham, who made several journeys to Asia. See Stearns, Petiver, 268–269, and Dandy, Sloane Herbarium, 215. 46 British Library, Sloane MS 4063, Vincent to Petiver, 17 November 1701.

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since damaged specimens were of no use to him. If Petiver insisted on sending him butterflies, then he would rather not have any that had been flattened between sheets of paper.47 Petiver had sent Maria Sibylla Merian a specimen with a rather big tail, which Ruysch did not yet have. Ruysch offered to send Petiver two butterflies for every one he received in good condition. Through an English bookseller he also sent him animals preserved in spirits, and asked to be sent something in return. In passing he warned Petiver about Levinus Vincent: ‘By the way, I heard that you are seeking to correspond with Mr Vincent; you will not find him to your liking, because—between you and me—he is an irascible misanthrope.’48 Petiver took little notice of Ruysch’s warning and simply went on corresponding with Vincent, who in turn warned Petiver about Ruysch: ‘You needn’t look for a correspondent in our country other than myself, since I have established a surprisingly solid correspondence with collectors and scientists in many countries.’49 Ruysch also sent Petiver plants. ‘I have received from him divers exotick plants, some of which I have not before nor since seen’, Petiver told Sloane. As professor at the Amsterdam Hortus, Ruysch occupied a strategic position in the world of botany and was thus approached by prominent botanists from many countries. Although he published almost nothing on botany, his post at the world’s best-known Hortus enabled him to cultivate contacts at the highest level: he had dedicated the third volume of his collection catalogue to the ‘prince of botanists of this century’, Joseph Pitton de Tournefort, ‘as a token of our long-standing friendship’.50 Tournefort—a fellow botanist who held the professorship at the Jardin des Plantes, the Paris Hortus—owned a collection of 8,000 dried plants. Some of them had come from the Pyrenees, which Tournefort had himself climbed. In fact, he was just back from a scientific expedition to Asia Minor.51 He, too, had devised 47 After Petiver’s death, Sloane said of him: ‘He had taken great pains to gather together the productions of nature, in England, and by his correspondents and acquaintances all over the world procured, I believe, a greater quantity than any man before him. He did not take equal care to keep them, but put them into heaps, with sometimes small labels of paper, where they were many of them injured by dust, insects, rain &c’ (MacGregor, Sir Hans Sloane, 23). 48 British Library, Sloane MS 4063, Ruysch to Petiver, 5 August 1702. 49 British Library, Sloane MS 4063, Vincent to Petiver, 27 February 1703. 50 AW 565. 51 During his expedition to Greece, Tournefort had looked for the plants described in Dioscorides’ classical handbook.

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a botanical system, which most botanists preferred to John Ray’s system—the one used at the Amsterdam Hortus.52 Ruysch also owed his rising international fame to his museum, which was frequently on the itinerary of grand tours—the extended trip abroad that served to round off the education of youngsters from well-to-do families. In the spring of 1703, for example, Ruysch was visited by George Dashwood, the son of a former mayor of London. Dashwood was accompanied by the British author Joseph Addison, who would become celebrated as co-publisher of The Spectator. Dashwood and Addison first travelled to France, Italy, Switzerland, Austria and Germany. The people they met along the way included the famous philosopher Leibniz, who described Dashwood as ‘a big fat bourgeois’. At Ruysch’s, they wrote in the guestbook (as did many others) ‘ars longa, vita brevis’, and praised (as had many others) the artist celebrated for eluding death: ‘o qui capacem nobilis artifex eludis orcum’.53 That summer Ruysch was visited by another Englishman, John Schult, who delivered a parcel from James Petiver. Schult wrote on 24 June to Petiver: ‘I will this day see dr. Ruysch, and bring your things.’ He had not yet learned the address of Maria Sibylla Merian, but hoped that Ruysch would be able to tell him where she lived. Schult had been asked to evaluate the quality of Merian’s forthcoming publication on the metamorphosis of the insects she had studied in Surinam. Four days later she wrote to Petiver to thank him for the letter and the present delivered by Schult. Schult reported that her work was of good quality. He had also spoken to Levinus Vincent, he told Petiver, but had given up hope of discovering any other interesting collectors in Amsterdam: ‘I have not found any curious [i.e. scientists] that deserve to be acquainted with you.’54 Schult then continued his journey, travelling to Halle in Germany and on to Sweden. Petiver gave Ruysch a set of herbaria containing plants from China that he had received in 1698, as well as the latest volume of his collection catalogue. Ruysch made sure that Petiver’s shipments to Maria Sibylla Merian reached their destination. Confessing that he found it

52 The Natural History Museum in London has two volumes containing 394 sheets depicting chiefly European plants, partly adopted by John Ray in his Historia plantarum, 1686–1688 (Natural History Museum, Sloane Herbarium, 111 and 112). 53 Amsterdam University Library, MS I E 20. 54 British Library, Sloane MS 4063, Schult to Petiver, 24 June 1703.

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difficult to correspond in French, Ruysch went on to say that he had butterflies in such quantities that he knew of no one who had a bigger collection of them in all of Europe. Petiver, whose French was even worse than Ruysch’s, had the letter translated into English, but evidently the translator was not well versed in French either, for he rendered that passage as follows: ‘butterflies, which I have by me in great number, tho there are others all over Europe that have many more than myself ’. Ruysch told Petiver that as soon as he had completed the catalogue of his anatomical collection he would embark on an inventory of his animal specimens, which would certainly include a drawing of the pipa, the strange toad in which Petiver had shown particular interest. Because he was planning to publish illustrated descriptions of some of the unusual animals in his collection, Ruysch could not part with his pipa specimens, but he sent Petiver a drawing of an American pipa, which was exceedingly rare. Indeed, since Maria Sibylla Merian had published a depiction of the animal (with its young on its back), specimens of pipas had become even more valuable. Petiver also received the fifth volume of Ruysch’s catalogue, which had been entrusted to a German physician. Ruysch described him as a worthy fellow and voiced his hope that Petiver would be willing to show him his collection.55 Lessons The German physician in question was probably Christian Heinrich Erndtl of Dresden, who travelled in the summer of 1706 to Amsterdam via Leipzig and Hamburg.56 Erndtl soon continued his journey, travelling to London in order to visit the famous Gresham College in Bishopsgate Street, where the Royal Society met every Wednesday. He found the natural history museum set up by the Royal Society interesting enough, apart from the anatomical preparations, which in his view did not amount to much. On the other hand, Sloane’s collection at Southampton Square was certainly very impressive, and he also thought Petiver’s collection important. Having made the acquaintance of Abraham Cyprianus, whom he held in high regard, Erndtl

55

British Library, Sloane MS 4040, Ruysch to Petiver, 26 August 1706. In 1700 he had published De usu historiae naturalis exotico-geographicae in medicina. 56

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Fig. 39 Depiction of a pipa americana from Het eerste cabinet der dieren. The male of this species rubs the fertilized eggs into the grooves on the female’s back. Next to the pipa on the left, the B marks the young, crawling out of the mother’s back. D marks the ‘cups’ that still contain young pipas. Ruysch cut open the back of the pipa on the right to show that there are no internal passageways from the hollows on its back to the inside of its body. The lids are decorated with little horns, shells and sprigs of sea plants.

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left London in December and sailed back to Holland, where he first went to Leiden to see the collection of Professor Bernhard Albinus. Erndtl found it remarkable that Albinus held the same view as John Woodward—a Gresham College professor known for his intractable character—who thought that the whole surface of the earth had split open during the Flood, giving rise to mountains that had not previously existed. This seemed to explain why fossils could be found both deep in the earth and on the tops of mountains.57 In Leiden Erndtl paid several visits to the famous instrument-maker Jan van Musschenbroek, and also inspected the Hortus and the museum in the theatrum anatomicum before leaving for Amsterdam, where he hoped to meet the dissectionists and surgeons. There he moved in with another German, Lorenz Heister of Frankfurt, who had attended the courses given by Ruysch and Rau. Heister proved to be on particularly good terms with Ruysch, who treated him as his special protégé. Heister had studied for four years in Giessen before going in 1706 to Leiden to attend Govert Bidloo’s classes, where he heard that he would do better to go to Amsterdam to study with Ruysch and Rau. Ruysch gave courses on herbal remedies at the Hortus, and during the summer he lectured in the anatomical theatre in the Weigh House, making use of his preparations. Heister’s private lessons with Ruysch were based on preparations, but Ruysch also allowed interested students like Heister to dissect cadavers at the hospital. Erndtl, too, attended classes given by Ruysch and Rau for several months, though Rau’s lessons in particular were very expensive. Rau charged Heister, Erndtl and the English student Nathaniel Wickham 250 guilders each, half of which had to be paid in advance. When they complained that Rau had broken their agreement, the professor was incensed. Erndtl found it an unpleasant experience, though he continued to admire Rau’s work. He was delighted, however, to make the acquaintance of a number of other reputable surgeons: Pieter Guenellon and Pieter Adriaansz and the latter’s son Adriaan Verduijn. Erndtl was impressed by the Hortus. Even though he thought its location mediocre and its maintenance inadequate, he found the Amsterdam

57 Woodward had published his ideas in 1695 in An Essay toward a Natural History of the Earth.

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Hortus to be the most beautiful in Europe. Nowhere else could one marvel at such an abundance of exotic plants. Erndtl saw a great deal that winter in Amsterdam. On 27 December 1706 Ruysch dissected a stillborn child as part of his course on anatomy. Shortly before this, Erndtl had watched Cornelis Boekelman amputate the foot of an elderly woman. He was also present in January when Ruysch was given a corpse from the hospital, the body of a woman who had died in childbirth. Ruysch used this corpse to instruct the midwives, but first he showed it to his students. Ruysch also opened up the body of an old woman to demonstrate a break in her thighbone. In 1680 the surgeon Gerrit Borst had performed an autopsy on a crippled woman and discovered a broken thighbone that had never healed properly. He subsequently ascertained that this was often the case with elderly cripples. Such cases, previously attributed to dislocated bones, now appeared to be caused by unhealed breaks. Ruysch thought this an interesting discovery. Having inspected the thighbone Borst had shown him, which ‘could hardly be wrested from his hands’, he had taken it home, supposedly to ‘clean it up a bit’, but in the meantime it had become a much-admired part of his collection.58 Ruysch taught Erndtl how to bleed patients, and showed him how the bladder functioned. He told him that Bidloo had diagnosed a hard swelling in a woman’s breast as cancer, but the woman had come to Ruysch for a second opinion. Noticing just in time that the diagnosis was incorrect, he had been able to prevent the removal of her breast. Erndtl observed that Ruysch was given a great many foetal corpses, and thought that one reason for this was the large number of aborted babies in Amsterdam, where many women, anxious to save their reputations, were apparently able to obtain abortions. Losing one’s good name was evidently so disastrous that women would go to any lengths to preserve their honour. Erndtl was surprised at the ease with which apothecaries prescribed abortion-inducing medicines. Foetuses of three or four months were killed with some regularity, and occasionally a woman even did away with a child after its birth. In late April 1707, Erndtl travelled to Cologne and from there to his native city of Dresden. On the way he stopped in Frankfurt to visit Lorenz Heister’s father. Erndtl had planned to settle in Dresden, but

58

AW 770; Titsingh, Verdonkerde heelkonst, 786–794.

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was now on his way to Poland, where he had been appointed personal physician to Friedrich August, Elector of Saxony and Designated King of Poland. In Warsaw, Erndtl wrote an account of his journey, relating that he had often been to see Ruysch and study his collection: ‘I visited Mr Ruysch many times and never missed the hour when he showed foreigners his Kunstkammer and explained its contents. The unbelievable quantities of prepared anatomical specimens and that surprising treasure of naturalia that he possesses silenced the curious spectators; counting their numbers was just like plunging into the sea.’ He referred to the seven volumes of Ruysch’s catalogue that had been published, but wished to draw particular attention to the most extraordinary thing in the collection, ‘namely the mummy of an eight-yearold boy, whose body he preserved after death with fluids and by his art, as he says, so gracefully that the colour and consistency of the skin and muscles look and feel natural and alive; the body parts and limbs of this mummy were not too hard, but had retained their softness, as though they were still vigorous and filled with fluids and blood. . . . It is a wondrous art, which that renowned man has brought about in the preparation of this mummy, surpassing all belief, unless one sees it for oneself, and although his rivals have expressed mixed opinions about the preparation of this corpse, nevertheless there is no one else who can produce and demonstrate anything similar.’ Erndtl knew that Rau, when asked how Ruysch could accomplish such a thing, always answered: ‘It is sheer trickery, for he peeled the outer layer of skin off that poor, miserable little boy.’ According to Rau, this gave the corpse the semblance of naturalness.59 The publication of Erndtl’s travel account aggravated the feud between Ruysch and Rau. Ruysch was furious when he read what Rau had said about his embalmed boy. He wondered how Rau could doubt the honesty of his methods, especially because he had exhibited that particular body in public on various occasion and in Rau’s presence. Ruysch resolved to display the body of the boy—who by now had been dead for nineteen years—at the next public anatomy lesson, and said: ‘No one will be able to say it is fraud unless he is so moved by hate and envy that he has taken leave of his senses.’ Ruysch could not under-

59 Erndtl, Relation (quoted in AW 778). Erndtl had also heard about De Bils, likewise said to have done extraordinary things, but he did not know if Ruysch was familiar with De Bils’s method.

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stand such behaviour, and attributed it to Rau’s poor upbringing: ‘If he had been brought up better, he would behave better.’60 Ruysch readily admitted that Rau possessed a great deal of knowledge about bones and muscles, and that he was an excellent stone-cutter. But Ruysch, like many others, objected to Rau’s behaviour, which was inappropriate for a man in his position: Rau’s anatomical collection was disorganized and poorly maintained, he displayed a shameless love of money, and he never managed to publish anything. Rau evidently felt more at ease among practitioners than among scientists. His reputation among surgeons was far less questionable. Hendrik Ulhoorn granted that Rau was ‘bad-tempered’, but in his view he ‘meant well and was candid in social intercourse, and did not have to resort to falseness or pretence; thus this plain-spoken man was regarded by some as rough and wild, because he resisted the hypocrites, the swindlers and the pedants’.61 Though Ruysch and Rau still did not get along, by this time they were less troubled by each other than by their other adversaries, some of whom they had in common. On various occasions Ruysch had asked the burgomasters to force the hospital to give him the corpses to which he had a right. In 1705 he told them that in recent years he had not been given a single cadaver, having been sent away with the excuse that there were no ‘strangers’ among the deceased patients. When the burgomasters demanded an explanation, the hospital regents replied that they had refused to hand over any corpses mainly because of ‘the abuse and internal disputes that have arisen between other doctors who likewise have permission to claim such subjects’. The burgomasters ordered them to supply Ruysch with the corpses he needed for his lessons.62 Rau then approached the authorities, telling them that his success had provoked hatred and envy, as a result of which corpses were withheld from him ‘through various circumlocutions’. He, too, complained to the burgomasters about the hospital regents, who maintained that some patients were so ill upon admission to the hospital that it was impossible to determine whether or not they were ‘strangers’. Sometimes friends and relatives did not present themselves until after a 60

‘His behaviour reflected his poor upbringing, but he dissected very cleanly’ (Haller, Geschichte 41). 61 Ulhoorn, Tweede vertoog, 356–357. 62 Amsterdam City Archives, hospital archives 1019, 1060.

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patient’s death. The regents suggested that too much use was being made of deceased hospital patients, and that ‘such a thing might create a stir among common folk’. The hospital was, after all, a public building, where anyone could walk in, pretending to visit a sick relative or friend. Clearly, such freedom compromised the patients’ privacy. In 1707, for example, it became known that Ruysch had earmarked for dissection the corpse of a hodman, who was not a native of Amsterdam. One of his mates got wind of the plan and mobilized the other workmen, who marched off together to the hospital, where they grabbed the hospital apothecary and threatened ‘to skin him and carve him up as they thought he had done to the deceased’. That could still be prevented, however, because the dissection had not yet taken place and they could be shown the untouched corpse. The men were satisfied and left peacefully, but the regents did not want a repetition of the incident. The burgomasters appreciated the arguments put forward by the regents of the hospital, but decided anyway to let Rau have three cadavers a year. Deceit From time to time Ruysch ran up against people in the respublica anatomica who attempted to claim his discoveries as their own. When he found out about it, he defended himself with his descriptions of the objects in his collection, which served not only as a catalogue, but also as an ongoing commentary on his anatomical activities. In the second volume of his catalogue, Ruysch rectified the description of the liver he had given in the first; when the engraver took too long to produce an illustration for the fourth volume, he decided to insert it in the fifth. Just as he had previously used his published letters to settle old scores with rivals whom he found too presumptuous, he now used the catalogues of his anatomical cabinets to reclaim his discoveries. In 1705, when a book appeared whose author had appropriated what Ruysch considered his most important discovery, namely that the cerebral cortex consisted of blood vessels, he recorded his reaction in the preface to the thesaurus he was writing at the time. The book in question, written by the French physician Raymond Vieussens, was called Novum vasorum corporis humani systema. Vieussens, a doctor at the hospital in Montpellier, was no stranger to

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the world of anatomy. As early as 1685, he had published his anatomical findings on the brain.63 Now, however, he claimed to have discovered that the cerebral cortex consisted of blood vessels, whereas in earlier writings he had stated that the cerebral cortex was composed of glands. Of course one could change one’s opinion, but Ruysch thought it remarkable that Vieussens had been prompted to change his by the results of a totally inadequate method of preparation: Vieussens claimed that he had boiled the brain for five hours, but Ruysch knew from experience that this method did not lead to the result described by Vieussens. The brain Ruysch had boiled in oil for this length of time had become so brittle that it had crumbled into powder between his fingers—and he had kept the boiled brain to prove it.64 After reading Vieussens’s treatise, Ruysch wrote to him, confronting him with the impossibility of his assertions and referring him to the Acta Lipsiensia, which announced new discoveries, including his own. Vieussens replied that he had not read it, nor did he know Ruysch’s work. Finally, Ruysch cited the 1701 Physiologia Medica by the Wittenberg professor Johann Gottfried Berger. According to Ruysch, Berger would never have insisted so adamantly that the cortex consisted of blood vessels if he had not seen Ruysch demonstrate this many years before. Ruysch defended his discovery with every piece of available evidence. The discovery had, in fact, been made possible by the preparation technique he had developed fourteen years earlier, which had enabled him to demonstrate the smallest parts of the body, making ‘people seem to come alive again after death, as witnessed by those who visit me daily to see this wonder’. In the preface to his thesaurus, Ruysch explained yet again how he prepared the cerebral cortex. He replaced only the blood in the arteries with his red, wax-like fluid, which he injected until it had penetrated to the extreme ends of the blood vessels. Then he sliced off a piece of the brain and hung it in liquid, so that it could be seen to consist entirely of blood vessels. Ruysch explained how rivals had been able to steal his findings. It was taking a long time to catalogue the contents of his cabinets. Such publications were labour-intensive, since each object required both a written description and an illustration. ‘No one would believe how 63 64

Neurographia universalis (Lyon, 1685). AW 752.

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Fig. 40 An opened skull (one of Ruysch’s preparations). Colour illustration by Johannes Ladmiral (Amsterdam University Library).

much time I spend making the depictions’, Ruysch sighed, ‘not to mention the hours I devote to my medical practice.’ Evil-minded individuals could thus exploit the fact that it took him so long ‘to perfect the publication’. Visitors asked him about specific preparations, wrote down what he said, and conveyed this information to others, who then publicized his findings as their own. This had happened not only to unpublished discoveries, but even to those already published, with illustrations and all, as evidenced by the case of Vieussens. Ruysch pointed out that this discovery had been published in 1699 in a letter to Ettmüller. For those who wanted to track it down, the letter was still available: interested persons should inquire at the publishing house of Janssoon van Waesberge in Amsterdam. 65 When Ruysch found out that Vieussens had appropriated even more of his discoveries, he again called him to account. He informed

65

AW 659–667.

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Hans Sloane of the affair, and explicitly reclaimed his discoveries in one of his thesauri. Evidently Ruysch’s recent work was less well known in France, and perhaps this was due to the fact that the Dutch were at war with the French. At the beginning of 1713, when the peace talks were nearly concluded, Ruysch received a parcel from Paris, a book on the digestion of food written by the physician Philippe Hecquet, who asked for Ruysch’s opinion. Ruysch needed some time to ponder this, but meanwhile sent a letter to Hecquet, in which he asked for his exact address, so that he could send him the ninth volume of his catalogue, soon to be published. He also sent Hecquet his animal catalogue, thus bringing his work to the attention of the French and reducing the chance of plagiarism.66 In the Netherlands, even though Ruysch had a solid reputation, he still had to struggle to maintain his position. He had examined the vessel-rich tissues in the eye and had observed a circle, from which the radial vessels of the iris emanated. Assuming these vessels to be arteries, he called the phenomenon a circulus arteriosus. This sparked a controversy with the physician Jacob Hovius, who rightly said that they were not arteries but veins, hence his name of circulus venosus. Hovius had been the first to demonstrate the existence of the circle, thanks to injections of wax and mercury, a method he described in his 1702 dissertation. Ruysch did not publish his discovery of the arterial circle until 1706. When Hovius attacked Ruysch fiercely, Ruysch countered by saying that Hovius’s wisdom had been gleaned from his preparations. Ruysch also used his thesauri as a platform to reply to the English physician Martin Lister. The same age as Ruysch, Lister was a celebrity—a member of the Royal Society and the king’s personal physician. Ruysch complained that Lister had wrongly accused him of giving a false picture of things, ‘an imputation that is more applicable to him, because he insists on giving opinions of things he has never seen; such recalcitrant people are difficult to bear, because they pass judgement on things they do not understand’. Without naming any source, Lister had made it seem as though Ruysch had denied the existence of glands in the body. Ruysch did not want to speak out too strongly against Lister. He resented Lister’s attempts to belittle his work, but

66

Amsterdam University Library, Ruysch to Philippe Hecquet, 7 February 1713.

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he understood the source of Lister’s aggression: ‘He prefers to cling to the old doctrine, held for centuries to be irrefutable.’67 Ruysch had known others like him: ‘I have received letters from a certain professor, who begged me not to publicize any more new discoveries, but rather to accept what has been assumed for centuries to be the absolute and incontrovertible truth.’ When he proved unwilling to oblige, the professor in question had described Ruysch’s behaviour as ‘beneath the dignity of a professor’. Ruysch replied with biblical succinctness: ‘Come and you shall see.’ In the end, the man did not come to see him, ‘but went to his Maker instead’.68 Visitors Among those visiting Ruysch’s museum in 1709 was Johan Starrenburg, the bailiff of Stellenbosch, who had been recalled to Holland by the directors of the Dutch East India Company after a conflict with the colonists at the Cape of Good Hope. In July he wrote to James Petiver that he had seen various collections of insects: those of Witsen, Ruysch and Vincent, as well as Caspar Fagel’s in The Hague. Although Vincent’s collection was famous, Starrenburg thought Fagel’s far better. Seeing all those superb collections had been inspirational, and he promised Petiver that if he were to return to the Cape, he would do his utmost to obtain unusual specimens for him.69 For English ‘amateurs’, exchanging information and specimens with the Dutch was far from straightforward. ‘Curious’ friends were bound by the same rules of friendship as ordinary friends: mutual help meant exchanging equivalent services. Buying specimens from each other was not done; it was only proper to pay in natura. This created difficulties for English collectors. An acquaintance of Petiver, who was seeking subscribers on the Continent for Petiver’s Gazophylacium naturae & artis (a series of depictions accompanying short descriptions of plants and animals), wrote to him from Amsterdam: ‘Here in Holland they do flatter themselves there is no country in the world where they have

67 68 69

AW 777. AW 1096. British Library, Sloane MS 4064, Starrenburg to Petiver, 20 July 1709.

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rare plants more abundantly than their own, and so they don’t seek for that which cometh from an other country.’70 Another acquaintance, Alexander McNaghten, who was also trying to recruit subscribers for Petiver’s publication, wrote to Petiver from Leiden: ‘I saw Ruysch about a month agoe, who was extreamly civil to me and very thankfull to you for the flies you sent him, but he said he had them all before, yet he thankd you for them and promisd to send you something that you never saw before. I told him you would be glad to have them, and I assur’d him you would make him a suitable return for them.’ McNaghten was intending to present Ruysch with a volume of Petiver’s depictions. He wrote again to Petiver while travelling in a passenger barge to Haarlem, on his way to Amsterdam, where he planned to visit the Hortus and the famous collections of Ruysch and Vincent.71 Meanwhile, in June 1711, Petiver was about to leave for Holland, but before crossing the English Channel, he let it be known that, if he did not survive the journey, Sloane was to inherit his entire collection. Petiver was on his way to Leiden to purchase objects for Sloane at the sale of the collection of Paul Hermann, a former professor of botany. Sloane had previously purchased, at the sale of Johan Huydecoper’s library, a herbarium containing dried flowers from the Cape of Good Hope. He knew that Hermann had spent eight years in Ceylon and had brought home a renowned herbarium and a cabinet full of exotic animals preserved in spirits. Before going to the auction, Petiver visited Ruysch in Amsterdam, after which he wrote to Sloane: ‘I have been very civilly received by Dr. Ruysch, who at my return promises me much more, if therefore you please to direct your commands for me to be left with him I shall soon receive them.’72 When Petiver returned from Leiden, Ruysch and Commelin granted him free access to the Hortus, where he was allowed to pick out specimens for his collection. He was not taken seriously, however, because he asked if he might have the damaged insects from

70

British Library, Sloane MS 4064, J.B. Fisher to Petiver, 13 August 1710. British Library, Sloane MS 4064, McNaghten to Petiver, 20 March 1711, 26 May 1711. McNaghten, a young man from Dublin, studied for a time in Leiden and obtained his doctorate in 1713 in Reims. 72 British Library, Sloane MS 4042, Petiver to Sloane, 29 June 1711. 71

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Surinam that Ruysch had put aside. This prompted the apothecary Albert Seba, likewise a collector, to call Petiver a dustman.73 That summer Hendrik Ruysch wrote a letter of introduction for Petiver, who was planning a visit to the Haarlem collector Willem d’Orville: ‘My dear cousin, please be so kind as to show your cabinet to the bearer of this letter, who is a prominent lover of rarities . . . He is Mr James Petiver of England, famous for his writings on all manner of scientific pursuits.’74 Petiver was clearly impressed by Hendrik’s knowledge of insects, and offered to include a piece by him in the Philosophical Transactions. (Petiver often gained the cooperation of correspondents by suggesting that the Royal Society was interested in publishing their work. In the case of Hendrik Ruysch, he even hinted that he would nominate him for membership.75) Petiver wrote an enthusiastic letter to his friend Patrick Blair in Scotland. Blair, a physician in Dundee, told Sloane that he had received a letter from Petiver, ‘giving account of severall delightfull passages happened to him in a voyage he latelie made to Holland att your desire. I wish you had thought on sending along with him my Manuale pharma-botanicum & synopsis methodi Turnifortiana, to be revised by the botanists there, with whom mr Petiver is now become personallie acquainted.’ Like Ray and Tournefort, Blair was attempting to develop a satisfactory system of classification, which—if the Dutch botanists thought it worthwhile—he would try to have published in Holland.76 Petiver was thoroughly satisfied with his visit to the Netherlands. He returned to London safe and sound, with three chests full of acquisitions, and talked for months about his experience. Blair was glad that Petiver had finally made the acquaintance of ‘these three great patriots of bottanie in that industrious countrie’: Ruysch, Commelin and Boerhaave.77 For years Ruysch and Commelin had been in charge 73

Stearns, Petiver, 285. British Library, Sloane MS 4064, Hendrik Ruysch to Willem d’Orville, 11 July 1711. D’Orville was a former clergyman. Poor health had forced him to retire in October 1707. 75 Undated letter from Petiver to Hendrik Ruysch (Sloane MS 4067). 76 British Library, Sloane MS 4043, Blair to Sloane, 15 March 1712. Blair was sentenced to death several years later for the part he allegedly played in the Jacobite Rising, but he was pardoned, thanks in part to Sloane. In 1720 his Botanick Essays were published (Dandy, Sloane Herbarium, 91). 77 Letters from Petiver to Sloane, British Library, Sloane MS 4042, fols. 295, 305; Sloane MS 3321, fol. 284. 74

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of the collection of the Hortus in Amsterdam, but the name of Boerhaave was new to botany. Herman Boerhaave had originally been appointed lector in medicine in Leiden, for one reason because Govert Bidloo—who had been spending long periods in England since his appointment as Willem III’s personal physician—showed little interest in teaching. This had caused students to leave Leiden, but now the arrival of Boerhaave more than compensated for the absence of Bidloo. Boerhaave’s classes were very popular, because he stripped medicine of all the incomprehensible and antiquated ballast and explained the workings of the body in a purely mechanistic way. Influenced by the work of Marcello Malpighi, whose collected works had been published in Leiden, Boerhaave thought that the human anatomy—particularly the design of the vascular system—led to the inescapable conclusion that the body was a machine, some parts of which consisted of vessels that collected, transported and processed fluids, while others had the mechanical task of ensuring movement. This clear explanation appealed to many students. Boerhaave’s success earned him the promise of a professorship: as soon as a chair fell vacant in the medical faculty, it would be his. But because Hotton, the botanist, was the first professor to die, Boerhaave was appointed professor of botany in 1709. His involvement with botany was not only accidental but also completely new, since before this time he had scarcely concerned himself with the subject. Nevertheless, Boerhaave quickly developed into a botanist of some note, even if Petiver was not yet convinced of this when he said, ‘He is an indefatigable person and may in time be a great botanist.’ In his new post Boerhaave was put in charge of the Leiden Hortus, where—as one of his students later recounted—he was seen daily, wearing clogs when he arrived early in the morning to study the plants. And that was not all: ‘He often traversed woods, dunes and fields, panting with fatigue, in order to touch and to fathom with his own eyes and hands that which he read about in books with unremitting diligence.’78 His new position made Boerhaave a colleague of Ruysch, and a relationship developed between them that would stand Ruysch in good stead in the Republic of Letters. Shortly before the arrival of Petiver, Ruysch had been paid a visit by Zacharias Conrad von Uffenbach, a young German lawyer travelling

78

See Heniger, Some botanical activities, 2.

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in the company of his brother.79 Uffenbach had come from Haarlem to Amsterdam, where he visited the anatomical theatre, which he had read about in a guidebook. In the guildhall he saw beautiful paintings (Rembrandt in particular), but few anatomical preparations. He had, however, come across various traces of Frederik Ruysch. The gold lettering on a panel on the mantelpiece recorded the names of the professors, the last on the list being Ruysch, whose coat of arms was displayed on the ceiling, beneath the dome. Uffenbach spent several weeks in Amsterdam visiting various scholars and collectors, including Maria Sibylla Merian, another native of Frankfurt. On 13 March he paid a visit to Rau, who had fallen from grace, having neglected for ten years to pay his compulsory contribution to the Hortus.80 Uffenbach had heard that Rau was considered Ruysch’s equal and even held by some to be his better. Rau told Uffenbach of his quarrel with Ruysch about the partition in the scrotum, and warned him, as he did everyone, that Ruysch’s preparations ‘were often covered with paint and polish’. Rau was ‘exceedingly polite, but his native tongue was very noticeable’, in the opinion of Uffenbach, who went on to say: ‘He has many beautiful anatomical preparations, but they are not clean and wellkept, which is a great shame.’ Most of the glass jars contained insufficient alcohol, so the preparations looked bad and were on the verge of decay. Uffenbach suspected that Rau was rather miserly, which surprised him, because he was a top-notch surgeon with a substantial income. But it could not be denied that Rau made a slovenly impression. ‘His other things, too, are in a terrible muddle. When I said that it was a pity, he replied that he kept things not because they were decorative but because they were useful.’ His preparations were shown in his anatomical and surgical lectures, which were very popular, especially among Germans, even though he demanded very high fees.81 Rau prided himself on his injections and, above all, on his skill in preparing bones, which he made as white as ivory, though he complained that they were adversely affected by the foul, damp air in Holland. Uffenbach was full of admiration for Rau, despite his sloppiness. Rau explained to him how teeth grew, showed him preparations of parts of 79

Uffenbach, Merkwürdige Reisen III, 639–642. Amsterdam City Archives, Collegium Medicum archive, resolutions, 3 March 1711. 81 Uffenbach, Merkwürdige Reisen III, 621–622. 80

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the eyes and ears, and let him examine several preparations through a microscope. ‘On the morning of 16 March, we went to see Mr Ruysch, the famous anatomist’, Uffenbach noted in his travel journal. ‘He is very courteous, but has so much to do, what with his patients and lectures and everything, that he scarcely has a free moment.’ Ruysch had told the Uffenbachs to come at 8 a.m., the time at which he usually held a class. The Uffenbach brothers were happy to attend, the more so because that morning Ruysch was demonstrating the penis. There were eight listeners, most of them English, who had each paid a hefty fee for an hour-long lesson every day for eight weeks. ‘Dr Ruysch does not lecture well’, Uffenbach concluded, ‘but his preparations are beautiful.’ Ruysch did not say much that was new to Uffenbach, except about the structure of the glans, which he clarified by showing various preparations. He also explained that the glans had papillae—little nipples— like those on female breasts, ‘which also produce the most sensation during coitus’. Ruysch claimed to be the first to notice the papillae.82 After the lecture, Ruysch showed the students his collection, ‘which one certainly views with astonishment’, said Uffenbach. ‘There were five rooms, the walls of which were lined with preparations.’ Ruysch said that if all the parts were put together, they would make up more than two hundred bodies. Uffenbach did not have enough time to take many notes, but that was not necessary, since Ruysch had compiled a catalogue that described every object in his collection. He was amazed that Ruysch had been able to gather together so many specimens, let alone prepare them all, and he admired the way they were presented. ‘Everything is at its most delicate in beautiful cabinets’, he noted. Nearly all the glass jars were sealed with pieces of intestine, some of which had been injected. ‘Almost everything can be taken for a living organ or organism; indeed, he prides himself on the fact that he always seeks to bring his preparations to life. Among the things he showed us were children’s heads, which not only had open eyes, but also such lively and rosy complexions that it seemed as though they had never died.’ Uffenbach was reminded of Rau’s warning, but did not venture to pass judgement. There was no human body part that Ruysch had 82

Uffenbach noted that ‘the glans consisted of the ends of both corpora, and belonged to the same structure, as he clearly demonstrated in various preparations’. That was remarkable, because all other anatomists, even De Graaf, thought that the glans was a ‘fleshy mass’ (‘massam carnosam’). See Chapter 8.

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not prepared countless times and in various ways. ‘He has particularly beautiful embryos, unbelievable numbers of them’, he observed, and then there was his large collection of other naturalia, such as shells, marine animals, insects and so on. The insect collection, which was particularly fine, comprised about one hundred boxes in which the insects were accompanied by elegant bunches of flowers and herbs, entirely different from the presentation of most collectors, whose use of oil of turpentine often produced a revolting mess. Uffenbach regretted that lack of time had prevented him from giving the collection more than a superficial look. Ruysch had had to cut their visit short in order to attend a funeral. While descending the stairs with his guests, he removed his everyday jacket and donned a black one. Before leaving Amsterdam at the end of March, Uffenbach visited several other ‘curious’ people, among them the traveller Cornelis de Bruijn (who ‘did not look at all curious . . . though he is extremely courteous’). He was sorry not to have seen Nicolaas Witsen’s collection, from which he was turned away three times. Apparently Witsen’s work at the Town Hall was keeping him so busy that he could not receive any visitors until April. Uffenbach had also wanted to visit Caspar Commelin and the Hortus, but by now he was fed up with the polite aloofness that typically accompanied Dutch refusals.83 On 29 March Uffenbach left for Utrecht. In the summer of 1714, Utrecht was also the destination of the Hungarian Johan Miskolczy-Szíjgyartó, who had gone there to study theology but first wanted to explore the rest of Holland. Shortly after arriving in Utrecht, he travelled on to Amsterdam and presented himself to Frederik Ruysch. They agreed on a tuition fee and Miskolczy began the following day, attending a botanical lesson at the Hortus. His notes record not only the great quantities of exotic plants, but also the other naturalia on display, such as bottles full of lifelike animals, and flowers that were several years old but looked as though they had just bloomed. ‘The doctor invited me to come the following day at 11 a.m. to show me his curiosities. I appeared at the appointed time, and spent three hours with him, but I would have stayed with him for three days without food or drink only in order to look at (I dare not say study) his curiosities.’ The walls of the rooms were lined with large cabinets with glass doors. Each cabinet contained numbered prepara-

83

Uffenbach, Merkwürdige Reisen III, 687.

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tions, including all kinds of ‘monstrous’ animals in bottles and every part of the human body. Human development was documented from conception to birth, so that Ruysch could demonstrate the growth of the human body month by month and even week by week. ‘I also saw a child whose eyes were open and so clear that it seemed to be alive. The professor showed me various other children—four, five and six years old—and of others the preserved feet, hands, internal organs and other body parts’, Miskolczy related. ‘He also showed me a boy, very handsome in appearance, who had died at the age of twelve and was so well preserved that a Russian ruler had bent down to kiss him, assuming him to be alive.’84 Physico-theology Time and again Ruysch’s visitors were enraptured and amazed, thus providing his museum with a raison d’être: such marvellous preparations reminded people of the omnipotence of the Creator. Some, however, questioned the necessity of knowing exactly how God’s Creation worked. Perhaps it was enough simply to revere and praise His handiwork. Thus there arose a need to justify the investigation of natural phenomena. Jan Swammerdam had wrestled with this problem and concluded that, while the study of nature was permissible, natural scientists should not seek worldly fame. Ruysch was much less severe in his judgement: he was unmistakably in his element as the artist who had delved so deeply into the secrets of nature that he could almost resurrect the dead. But he did agree with Swammerdam that the study of nature should serve primarily to demonstrate the miraculousness of Creation. ‘Sir, I hereby present you with the almighty hand of God in the anatomy of a louse, in which you will see wonder upon wonder’, Swammerdam had written to his patron Melchisedec Thévenot, and in the same vein he wrote a verse: O God, how precious is the great profusion of your thought. Infinite the countless strengths and wisdom you have brought To bear upon your handiwork: all of humanity, Of which each tiny particle reveals your majesty.85

84 85

Antal, Dagboek, 99–100. Lindeboom, Ontmoeting, 29, 112.

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By showing people parts of the body so wondrously wrought that they were almost beyond human comprehension, Ruysch thought he would make them even more convinced of the Lord’s omnipotence.86 Reinier de Graaf had said that even though God had not made man immortal, He had given him the means to reproduce: ‘To complete this masterpiece, he produced various organs so ingeniously that one may rightly declare that herein—if indeed anywhere—God the Almighty has given a great and certain sign of his wonderful providence and wisdom.’87 Similarly, various researchers coupled their scientific work with religious reflections in order to justify the study of nature. Such scientists as Boyle and Newton stressed that the study of nature led to a better understanding of the Creator. Boyle thus attempted to defend religion against philosophers such as Thomas Hobbes, who thought they could circumvent religion and arrive at the truth through mathematical reasoning. Johannes Hudde, on the other hand, had attempted to deploy mathematical reasoning in support of religion, but he had run into difficulties. In his view, heathens could not be persuaded by the Bible, so philosophical arguments were needed to demonstrate, first, that God existed, and second, that there could be only one God. A committed Cartesian, Hudde felt that Descartes had merely assumed, rather than proved, the oneness of God. And although Hudde had framed his own line of reasoning, he found it too subtle for others, and was therefore in search of a philosopher who could argue his case more convincingly. He had approached Spinoza and discussed his problem with De Volder, but they, too, had been unable to come up with convincing and rational arguments. Hudde read The Reasonableness of Christianity by John Locke, in the hope that Locke could convince him, but to no avail: in Locke’s opinion, a philosophy as weakly founded as that of Descartes could never provide the answer to Hudde’s question.88 Since mathematical reasoning was not a satisfactory means of finding God, He was sought increasingly in nature. But that, too, was proving problematical. Research had shown that everything functioned according to the laws of nature, but it was this idea that threatened to demote God to an unknowable force behind those natural laws, instead of an omnipresent God in permanent control. On the other

86 87 88

AW 824. Lindeboom, Reinier de Graaf, 49. Corr. Locke V, 679; VI, 206, 243, 257, 321, 346, 353, 363, 386, 432, 464.

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hand, it also seemed possible to uphold the existence of God by studying nature, since research had revealed that nature was characterized not only by laws, but also by an extremely ingenious structure, and the wonder aroused by that structure could inspire a profound reverence for its Creator. The English scientist John Ray considered the study of nature important because it revealed God’s providence. His lectures were published in 1691 as The Wisdom of God Manifested in the Works of the Creation. In the Netherlands, Bernard Nieuwentijt—physician and mathematician, as well as burgomaster of Purmerend—published in 1715 a religious apologia in which he attempted to demonstrate that scientific research need not lead to renouncing one’s faith in God.89 If natural laws were viewed as an expression of God’s providence, the latest scientific insights could be reconciled with Christianity. Everything in Creation served to promote the welfare of humankind, so there could be no impersonal force behind natural laws: a wise and providential God was an indispensable part of the equation. Nieuwentijt had to admit, however, that modern views did not always agree with the Bible, but that was because the Bible was written in an idiom comprehensible to ordinary people, whereas modern scientific insights were not. In Nieuwentijt’s view, divine revelation was the ultimate path to truth, but the study of nature was a useful means of understanding God’s providence. Nieuwentijt’s approach—physico-theology—was popular. As usual, Ruysch did not express himself in theoretical terms, but he voiced similar sentiments, ever more frequently and emphatically as he grew older. What he presented in his museum were ‘the miracles of God Almighty’. His response to Nieuwentijt was a subtle allusion to the appearance of his work. In the thesaurus he published that year, he declared, when discussing a preparation whose vascular pattern was perfectly clear: ‘Although I possess thousands of anatomical specimens that could be used to combat atheism, this preparation alone would suffice.’90

89

Het regt gebruik der Wereltbeschouwingen, ter overtuiginge van ongodisten en ongelovigen (The correct use of world views, for the purpose of convincing atheists and doubters). See Vermij, Secularisering. 90 AW 877. See also AW 824, 1085.

CHAPTER SEVEN

THE RETURN OF PETER THE GREAT Collections like Ruysch’s could be treasured for all sorts of reasons. Not only were they valuable as storehouses of knowledge, status symbols and objects of trade, but they were cherished, above all, as sources of amazement and delight. But because such collections were generally of the greatest interest to those who had amassed them, many were dispersed after the death of the collector, whose heirs were seldom prepared to lavish the same amount of time and money on them as the original owner. Usually the different sections of the collection were sold separately. A collector who wanted to keep his life’s work intact did best to sell his collection to an institution that could be expected to care for it permanently. The future was always uncertain, of course, but it was assumed that universities, learned societies and royal houses would shoulder such responsibilities. Jan Swammerdam, for example, tried (unsuccessfully) to sell his collection to the De’ Medici family. When an elderly collector sold his treasures, the proceeds mainly benefited his heirs, who were thus compensated to some extent for the money he had invested in the collection during his lifetime, while the collector himself was left with the pride he took in his life’s work, and the confidence he had in its preservation for posterity. In 1704 the elderly clergyman Johannes Smetius sold his collection of coins and antique Roman objects for 20,000 guilders to Johann Wilhelm, Elector Palatine. Other Amsterdam collectors who were getting on in years, such as Frederik Ruysch and Levinus Vincent, had also begun to consider the eventual fate of their treasures. England was one of the countries where they hoped to find buyers for their collections, so they naturally used their English connections to advertise their intentions to sell. One person Ruysch approached was the Scottish surgeon Archibald Adams, who worked in Norwich. Adams had visited Ruysch in Amsterdam in the winter of 1705, and after his return to Norwich, the two men had kept in touch. In the summer of 1707, Adams told Hans Sloane that Ruysch had written to say that he hoped to sell his collection to someone in England: ‘I believe no Englishman will sooner engage in that purchase than yourself, whose

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judgment & abilities bear a proportion to the value you have for such sort of knowledge.’ Adams suggested that Sloane buy the collection for the Royal Society and house it in the museum in Gresham College. Because every physician in London would benefit from the purchase, Adams proposed that every doctor in London and its vicinity contribute 20 pounds and every surgeon 30 pounds towards the price of Ruysch’s collection. He was convinced that England would soon outdo all the world. If the purchase were to take place, he himself would be able to contribute to England’s fame in the field of anatomy: ‘Ruysch tells me that if any British subject, corporation or college shall purchase his closet he will make me as perfect as himself in the art of embalming, injecting & preserving in animated bodys’, Adams confided to Sloane. ‘I know his balsamick liquor and his materia cercarea rubra, by which I can do severall things in his way, but still I am a stranger to one part of his art which I value mightily, which, if I knew, I would soon make Gresham one of the finest anatomical repositorys in the world, which I would willingly undertake purely to promote the designs of publick benefactors.’1 This was not the first time that Adams had hatched grandiose plans. He also announced his intention to make a new kind of microscope, an improvement on those of Van Leeuwenhoek. Sloane, apparently unimpressed, made no move to buy Ruysch’s collection. Collection for Sale Ruysch was far from finished with the catalogue of his anatomical specimens, but the interest shown in his plants and animals prompted him to interrupt that work to compile an inventory of one of his cabinets of animals, to give interested parties an idea of the wide-ranging nature of his collection. In the spring of 1710, he sent Petiver a copy of his thesaurus animalium and an accompanying letter, which he entrusted to his protégé Lorenz Heister, to whom he also gave a letter of introduction, praising the bearer as ‘in utroque studio & botanico

1

British Library, Sloane MS 4041, Adams to Sloane, 30 July 1707; see also Sloane MS 4042. Adams studied for a time in Leiden and obtained his doctorate in 1705 in Utrecht. Materia cercarea rubra is a reference to the red, wax-like substance that Ruysch injected.

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& anatomico versatissimus’.2 Heister delivered another letter to Sloane on this occasion, from a new acquaintance of his, Alexander Stuart, an English surgeon studying in Holland who had attended classes given by Herman Boerhaave. Stuart told Sloane that he had made the acquaintance of Lorenz Heister, ‘a very ingenious man’ who was ‘very intimat’ with Frederik Ruysch and would doubtless be able to clarify something he had heard, namely that Ruysch ‘has some thoughts of disposing of his anatomical praeparations, which are indeed wonderfully fine & with good reason judged by all who have seen them farr beyond all that has been hitherto done of that kinde. I have seen severall of them. I hear he values the whole, together with his secret method of injection, att between one and two thousand pounds starling.’ He had not heard the rumour from Heister, but Heister would be able to tell him ‘what really there may be in this report, which I was willing to hint to you, knowing your singular curiosity in the most valuable parts of art & nature might probably incline you to make such a purchase’.3 Sloane still showed no interest, but Ruysch did not lose heart. In the spring of 1714, he received Petiver’s acquaintance Richard Bradley, a botanist who had been elected to the Royal Society two years earlier. Bradley had first visited Boerhaave, who had shown him around the Leiden Hortus. Ruysch gave Bradley access to the Amsterdam Hortus, where he was permitted to collect hundreds of plants to dry. Ruysch also let him draw the birds, beetles and butterflies in his collection, no doubt in the hope of furthering its sale by word of mouth. He made it perfectly clear that this was his intention, for Bradley said in a letter to Petiver that Ruysch was very much hoping to sell his collection to Sloane. Bradley did not turn out to be the trustworthy go-between Ruysch was hoping for. He had become a member of the Royal Society through the influence of Petiver, who expected him to use his membership to contribute to his collection. Bradley claimed to be a doctor with a degree from Oxford, allegedly travelling to increase his knowledge,

2

British Library, Sloane MS 4064, Ruysch to Petiver, 15 May 1710. British Library, Sloane MS 4042, Stuart to Sloane, 4 January 1710, 22 May 1710. Stuart wanted to follow Heister and go in July (when the courses were finished) to seek out the army in Flanders, in order to see a relative and to visit the army hospital (Sloane MS 4042). He eventually sailed to East Asia as a ship’s surgeon (Sloane MSS 4045, 4067). 3

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but in fact he had never attended university. He even prevailed upon Petiver to send him prescriptions and to forge his doctoral certificate. ‘So soon as I can gett money I will leave this cold country for Paris & there studdy medcine in good earnest’, Bradley wrote in September to Petiver, himself an unqualified ‘doctor’ who treated patients in London.4 Bradley left after borrowing two guineas from Ruysch. Later he was appointed professor of botany at Cambridge, on the basis of his empty promise to establish there a public botanical garden. When he proved to know neither Greek nor Latin, a lector had to be appointed to give his lectures. He died while discussions were underway to dismiss him from his professorship. Hans Sloane, the Royal Society and the English Crown were not the only possible buyers of Ruysch’s collection. The learned societies in Paris and Berlin were also candidates, as were various German princes. Ruysch had already entered into negotiations with the German emperor Leopold. The emperor had been told of the valuable collection by his brother-in-law Johann Wilhelm, Elector Palatine, who had visited Ruysch in 1695. Leopold had shown an interest in the secret of Ruysch’s preparation method, but his death in 1705 had put an end to the negotiations.5 Ruysch, who revealed that the emperor had offered him 20,000 guilders for his embalming method, was elected that same year to the Academia Caesarea Leopoldo-Carolina Naturae Curiosum, the imperial Academy of Science, which had welcomed Caspar Commelin as a member the year before.6 In 1714 Ruysch dedicated his ninth thesaurus to Andreas Gundelsheimer, a doctoral candidate at the University of Altdorf, who had accompanied Joseph Pitton de Tournefort on his expedition to Asia Minor. Gundelsheimer had been serving as personal physician to the King of Prussia since 1703, and had visited Amsterdam in the king’s entourage in 1711. The Prussian king was another potential buyer. With a view to a possible sale, Ruysch—meanwhile seventy-six— installed a ‘royal cabinet’, larger than all the others and beautifully

4

British Library, Sloane MS 3322. See Stearns, Petiver, 248–250. Radziun, Anatomische collectie, 51–52. 6 The imperial Academy had maintained good relations with Amsterdam during the presidency of the Nuremberg physician, botanist and collector Johann Georg Volckamer, who corresponded with Levinus Vincent and Maria Sibylla Merian. Volckamer died in 1693 and was succeeded by Lucas Schroeck of Augsburg, under whose presidency Pieter Hotton (1701), Caspar Commelin (1704) and Frederik Ruysch (1705) were elected in succession. 5

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embellished, which contained 565 preparations. In the inventory of that thesaurus regius, published as the tenth volume of his catalogue, he voiced his intention to sell the collection, which ‘increasing old age’ had prompted him to complete. He said he had prepared and described every part of the body, and described his museum as so alive ‘that it entices and delights the viewer’. Ruysch had done his best ‘to improve the dreadful sight of dissected and amputated body parts with suitable decorations, so that they neither displease the eye nor cause horror and disgust’. To ensure that his specimens would last, he had embalmed them, so that they would remain unspoiled for centuries, and to facilitate the use of his collection, he had drawn up an index that would enable everyone to learn ‘Ruyschian anatomy, free of all disgusting work, messy operations and foul smells’. The owner of the Ruysch Collection would find it both entertaining and edifying. It was suitable for instruction, so if a prince or regent were to donate the collection to a university, it would bring him everlasting fame. To Ruysch’s mind, potential buyers included princes, universities and learned societies, as well as wealthy individuals. They could acquire what he had created with his ‘special art and nearly sixty years of work’, something that ‘could not be seen anywhere else in the world and had not been known in any other century’.7 ‘While I am still alive, I am putting this work, which I have completed myself, up for sale, so that before I die I can be assured of the existence of a perfect record of my discoveries, since this would not come about easily after my death.’ Potential buyers could inspect the collection at Ruysch’s house, but before starting negotiations, he wanted proof of sufficient funds. To allay any fears that his preparations would decay, he promised to show the buyer the art of preservation he had used, which differed somewhat from the methods of other anatomists: ‘I shall likewise instruct him in the preparation of the preservation liquid with which the bottles are filled.’ He promised to fill and seal the bottles in such a way that they could be kept for many years without refilling. Correct preservation of the specimens was very important. Ruysch had discovered that not all preparations could be preserved in the same way, and incorrect methods of preservation would cause them to lose their lustre. He therefore undertook

7

AW (Frederik Ruysch, Alle de Werken) 820.

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to reveal this and other secrets to the buyer, on the condition that they not be made public. It had previously been thought, Ruysch reminded his readers, that the art of anatomy had reached perfection with the publication of the atlas of Vesalius, who had left nothing for later generations to discover. Yet the opposite had proved to be true: after Vesalius, men such as Eustachi, Falloppio, Casserio, Aselli and Harvey had made important discoveries, and they were followed by many others. Ruysch named Pecquet, Bartholin, Lower, Willis, De Graaf, Swammerdam, Malpighi, Nuck and Duverney. Ruysch himself had built upon the discoveries of his predecessors. Sometimes he had been forced to correct them. In accordance with the teachings of Hippocrates, it was his duty to praise others, but at the same time to delve ever deeper into their findings. Ruysch thus put his work in perspective, which made it possible for him to sum up his achievements: demonstrating the valves in the lymph vessels, discovering the pulmonary artery, and, above all, developing his method of arterial injection. He reiterated that he had discovered a way of making visible the tiniest of blood vessels: ‘From that time on, I have spent day and night, up to old age, making every effort to acquire an understanding of the material from which God made us.’ Ruysch’s discoveries had enabled him to peer ‘into the innermost recesses of nature’. It was only natural for Ruysch to emphasize his achievements when advertising his work; normally he was the first to admit that knowledge of the human body was extremely limited. The processes that took place in those ‘innermost recesses’ largely remained obscure. It was possible to speculate about them, but Ruysch thought it wiser to rely on close observation as a means of advancing knowledge. He had said this early on, in the days when many were still optimistic about the possibilities of mathematical reasoning. Now, however, Ruysch was in sync with the Zeitgeist. After a period in which scientists had made one amazing discovery after another, the inability of the human intellect to fathom the workings of the human body had been recognized. ‘I discover more and more our profound ignorance’, Pieter Guenellon wrote to John Locke. He thought that most people who assumed they had understood the workings of the human body had actually deluded themselves into believing meaningless words. There were treatments aplenty, all recommended on the basis of experience, but how much of that experience was reliable? The impossibility of

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determining the exact composition of substances meant that doctors could do nothing but observe the symptoms of illness and assess the efficacy of the available remedies.8 Guenellon had come to this conclusion after reading for the second time the French translation of John Locke’s Essay Concerning Human Understanding, in which Locke had suggested giving all metaphysical questions a rest, because the human intellect was incapable of coming up with sensible answers. The human faculties were attuned to earthly existence, so Locke thought it wise to confine oneself to knowledge useful in that realm, claiming that such knowledge was obtained through sensory experience. Herman Boerhaave reasoned along the same lines. In a lecture titled De comparando certo in physicis, he stated that all attempts to grasp the essence of things had been fruitless. He concurred with Newton’s idea that nature was essentially unfathomable and that basic scientific concepts could be derived only from experience. Medical science owed a great deal to the mechanistic concept introduced by Descartes, but his deductive method should be rejected, in the view of Boerhaave, who thought it best—in medicine, at least—to base conclusions on observation. Boerhaave integrated the most important scientific findings in a physiological model which he presented to his students. In doing so he made pointed use of the anatomical findings of Frederik Ruysch, whose views were thus widely disseminated, since a great many European universities adopted Boerhaave’s model. Boerhaave told his students that all organs consisted of blood vessels, and described a system of smaller and smaller vessels branching out from the arteries, which extracted from the blood increasingly refined fluids, including lymph and ultimately the spiritus that flowed through the nerves. In addition to their shared scientific interests, Ruysch and Boerhaave had developed personal ties. To begin with, they were both utterly devoted to their field of study. Like Ruysch, Boerhaave began work at the crack of dawn. Every morning at 7 a.m. he gave a class in the Hortus, during which he discussed dozens of plants without recourse to notes of any kind. Although both Ruysch and Boerhaave kept a close eye on financial matters, they shared a certain simplicity. A prominent scientist who had once studied with Boerhaave described

8

Guenellon to Locke, 4 July 1702 (Corr. Locke VII, 640; see also IV, 628).

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him as friendly, sincere, and devoid of all arrogance. He was also frugal, though ‘more out of contempt for the futilities of splendour than through love of money’.9 In the spring of 1715, Sloane received a letter from Boerhaave, who announced that he had finally persuaded his much-admired friend Ruysch to complete the catalogue of his anatomical collection, the index of which was enclosed in the letter. Boerhaave marvelled at the number of beautiful and amazing objects on display, all of which were on sale at Ruysch’s house. Boerhaave emphasised that he was not acting as a go-between. Indeed, he had sent Sloane the index without Ruysch’s knowledge, because he would also be happy if Ruysch’s work—a monument of the most sophisticated anatomization of which man was currently capable—ended up with someone who would make it accessible to a wide public. Sloane still did not come forward as a potential buyer, but he did inform Ruysch that the Royal Society of London for the Improving of Natural Knowledge (since 1703 under the chairmanship of Isaac Newton) had made him a ‘foreign member’, along with Levinus Vincent, Willem Jacob ’s-Gravesande and several others.10 The previous year Richard Bradley had let it be known that Ruysch would like to become a member of the Royal Society, and at Petiver’s suggestion that honour had been granted him on 9 June 1715. Ruysch, no doubt displeased at Sloane’s refusal to buy his collection, was slow to acknowledge this prestigious appointment.11 Sloane’s failure to jump at this offer was, to some extent, understandable. The Royal Society probably lacked the funds to acquire Ruysch’s collection, and Sloane—who was insufficiently interested in anatomy—would have derived little honour from its purchase. The plants, animals and objets d’art he acquired had always been subsumed into the Sloane Collection, but Ruysch’s anatomical preparations would unmistakably remain the Ruysch Collection. Yet because Sloane was interested in exotic plants and animals, he wished to stay on friendly terms with Ruysch and no doubt hoped that making him a member of the Royal Society would cement their good relations.

9

Haller, Tagebücher, 39. Willem Jacob ’s-Gravesande, a lawyer from The Hague and also the science editor of the Journal littéraire de la Haye, had travelled in 1715 to London, where he met Newton. He was soon appointed professor of mathematics at the University of Leiden. 11 British Library, Sloane MS 3322. 10

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Ruysch let several months pass before writing to Sloane in September. Offering excuses for his late reply—his teaching load had been extremely heavy, and he had had to wait for a relative to translate Sloane’s letter into Dutch—Ruysch merely said he had taken note of his election to the Royal Society, and this statement was followed by some news of a professional nature.12 Ruysch promptly dedicated his next publication to the German ‘Society of Nature Discoverers’, the Academia Caesarea Leopoldo-Carolina Naturae Curiosum.13 He named this volume of anatomical observations Adversariorum anatomico-medico-chirurgicorum, in imitation of the Adversaria anatomica by the Italian anatomist Giovanni Battista Morgagni, to which publication Boerhaave had drawn his attention. In the preface Ruysch reported that he had completed the tenth volume of his anatomical catalogue and did not intend to continue the series. A Return Visit While Frederik Ruysch was trying to sell his collection in England and Germany, his fellow apothecary Albert Seba was tapping other sources. Like Ruysch and Vincent, fifty-year-old Seba was looking for a buyer for his collection of naturalia through the contacts he had acquired as a trader in medicines. Seba had amassed his collection by being one of the first to board returning ships, where he bought trading commodities, sold remedies, and acquired curiosities brought back by the seamen. His extensive network of foreign correspondents had enabled him to build up both a flourishing business and a unique collection that filled a number of rooms in his house. His cabinets contained shells, coral, stuffed birds, butterflies, herbaria, and long rows of glass jars with snakes, lizards and even human foetuses, all preserved in spirits. Born to a peasant family in a village in Oost-Friesland, Seba had learned Latin from his schoolmaster, a former theology student. He had then been trained by various apothecaries, the first being the brother of their village clergyman, followed by others in Groningen and Amsterdam. Having gone on to study in Nuremberg and Strasbourg, Seba had ended up in Amsterdam, where he sat his apothecary’s 12 13

British Library, Sloane MS 4044, Ruysch to Sloane, 17 September 1715. AW 933.

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examination, married the daughter of an apothecary, and bought an apothecary shop in Haarlemmerstraat. He then went on to become a wholesale trader in medicines. Seba eventually became purveyor of medicines to the government of Russia, where quite a bit had happened since the return of Tsar Peter from the Netherlands and England. The tsar had defeated his rivals, the Swedes, and had built a city on the newly captured territory. Located on the banks of the River Neva, St Petersburg was declared the capital in 1712. Since returning to Russia, the tsar had founded various schools and recruited foreign specialists as teachers. In 1706 the first hospital was opened in Moscow. Directed by Nicolaas Bidloo, it had its own apothecary shop, a hortus medicus, and an anatomical theatre where physicians were trained. Bidloo based his anatomy lessons on the books of Gerard Blaes, Steven Blankaart and Lorenz Heister, and the atlas published by his uncle Govert Bidloo. For his lessons in surgery he used the procedures developed by Rau. Dissections were also carried out, sometimes in the presence of the tsar. The hospital physicians were allowed to open up executed criminals, provided they turned such dissections into lessons for their students.14 In 1714 the tsar decided to have his collection (mostly birds, reptiles and fish preserved in spirits, which he had brought back from Holland in 1698) moved from Moscow to St Petersburg, to form the basis of a Kunstkammer. The collection was housed temporarily in his ‘summer palace’, a rather modest building on the River Neva. The tsar, determined to turn St Petersburg into a centre of excellence, also resolved to have a hortus botanicus laid out. Apparently news of his plans had travelled as far as Amsterdam. In any case, Albert Seba began in June 1715 to recommend his collection to those with whom he had negotiated his trading contracts, who also happened to be responsible for the tsar’s collection: the physician Robert Erskine and his assistant Johann Daniel Schumacher, a young man from Colmar who had studied philosophy in Strasbourg and was said to be an atheist. Robert Erskine, a physician nearing the age of forty, was originally from Scotland, where at the age of fifteen he had become apprenticed to a surgeon-cum-apothecary in Edinburgh. Later he obtained his doctorate from the University of Utrecht, after which he attended a course of lectures given in Paris by the anatomist Duverney. From

14

Radziun, Anatomische collectie, 51.

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1702 he taught anatomy in London, where he became a member of the Royal Society. Erskine chose the path of adventure in 1704, when he went to Russia to become personal physician to Alexander Menshikov, the tsar’s right-hand man. He catalogued the plants in Moscow and the surrounding countryside before becoming personal physician to the tsar. The Dutch traveller Cornelis de Bruijn said that Erskine was known for his ‘experience and knowledge, as well as his affability and good manners’. An English engineer working in Russia found him ‘most ingenious’, and a Scottish soldier described him as an ‘agreable, openhearted fine gentleman’.15 Erskine had changed the spelling of his name to Areskine, to fit the Russian pronunciation. Albert Seba wrote to Erskine and Schumacher to say that he had a beautiful museum full of naturalia: animals in spirits, rare insects, shells, minerals, birds and marine plants from all over the world. If the tsar were to buy his collection—which he claimed was larger than those of Ruysch and Vincent—it would remain intact. He was prepared to part with it for a reasonable price, because his business prevented him from devoting enough time to it. The asking price was 15,000 guilders, even though he thought it worth 20,000. In early August, Seba went ahead and sent some shells and butterflies to Russia in a shipment of medicine. Although he had around 800 glass jars containing animals in spirits, he dared not send any for fear that the glass would break en route. At Schumacher’s request he sent a catalogue of his collection to St Petersburg at the beginning of October, whereupon the tsar decided in January 1716 to buy the collection, for which he paid 13,000 guilders. Seba confirmed the sale on 20 March and in early June his collection set sail for Russia. The ships were obliged to shelter for a while in the harbour at Copenhagen to escape Swedish privateers, but on 2 September, Schumacher reported that the collection had arrived safe and sound.16 On 24 April 1716—one month after confirming the sale of his collection—Seba suggested in a letter to Erskine that the tsar should also buy Ruysch’s cabinet. He said he had incidentally obtained some information about it, and promised to buy a few of Ruysch’s preparations—supposedly for his own pleasure, since Ruysch would ask twice as much for them if he knew they were intended for the

15 16

Von Richter, Geschichte der Medicin III, 116. See Driessen, Kunstkamera, 115, 131.

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tsar—which he would then send to Russia. Seba reported that Ruysch had completed the catalogue of his tenth cabinet and put it up for sale. For this anatomical cabinet, which was said to contain around 200 glass jars, Ruysch was asking 1,000 ducats (more than 3,000 guilders), having refused an offer of 2,000 guilders. Seba sent the catalogue and some of Ruysch’s preparations to St Petersburg. At that time Erskine was with the tsar in Danzig, where they received a letter sent from St Petersburg by Schumacher, who wrote: ‘Ruysch is asking 3,000 guilders for his cabinet, although according to Seba it is worth no more than 2,000. Seba has bought four anatomical specimens, which he wants to give to you, along with some other things, to embellish your cabinet.’ Schumacher thought Ruysch’s preparations an important acquisition, and asked Erskine to consider buying the collection. That spring the tsar was busy adding to his own collection. He had sent an agent to Amsterdam to buy paintings, and had called upon the merchant Pieter de la Court van der Voort to act as his artistic adviser. In late June the tsar’s agent sent him 120 paintings bought at public auctions and from private individuals. The tsar decided to acquire Ruysch’s work as well, not just the ‘royal cabinet’ but the entire collection. In the meantime the tsar had left for Holland, where he was to meet with European diplomats and conduct talks intended to end the costly war with Sweden. In November 1716 he travelled from Copenhagen to Lübeck and from there to Utrecht. At the beginning of December he was met in Amersfoort by the Russian ambassador, Boris Ivanovich Kurakin, and the commissioner Christoffel Brants. From Utrecht he travelled incognito in a rented barge to Amsterdam, where he stayed at Brants’s house on the Keizersgracht. At the party held by Brants, the regents of Amsterdam tried to toast the tsar, but he said: ‘Those French compliments mean nothing to me. Pass me the jug.’ He thought the regents would do better to speak ‘like carpenters’. The tsar was treated to a performance of Vondel’s Gijsbrecht van Amstel and given the opportunity to visit his old stomping grounds: the shipyards of the Admiralty and the Dutch East India Company. Twenty years after his first visit to Amsterdam, the tsar again went to see Frederik Ruysch. When the two men met at Ruysch’s house on the Bloemgracht, the tsar shook Ruysch’s hand and exclaimed: ‘My good old master!’ Ruysch was honoured, and later said that the tsar had ‘paid such a tribute to me that no one would have expected it of so

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great a monarch’.17 The tsar visited the Hortus, where Ruysch taught, and assembled a herbarium from the plants he had collected on his journey. He bought more paintings, though he found them rather uninteresting. At auctions he sought the advice of the Swiss stilllife painter Georg Gsell, who was married to Dorothea, the younger daughter of Maria Sibylla Merian. The Gsells accepted the tsar’s invitation to come to St Petersburg to give drawing lessons. Maria Sibylla Merian, who had been crippled for the last couple of years, died during the tsar’s stay in Amsterdam. Shortly before her death, he bought all of her original watercolours, paying 3,000 guilders for ‘two large books containing loose-leaf drawings on parchment of flowers, butterflies and other creatures’.18 The tsar also visited Jacob de Wilde, who had set up a museum behind his house on the Herengracht. De Wilde’s daughter Maria gave the tsar a drawing of his 1697 visit. On Christmas day he paid a visit to Seba, together with Erskine and others of his retinue, and stayed more than two hours. The tsar looked at a two-headed deer, embalmed by Ruysch, which belonged to the banker Theodoor Huijghens. The tsar offered to buy it, but Huijghens would not part with it, not even for 100 ducats. After visiting Seba, the tsar fell ill and took to his bed for six weeks. He recovered just in time to welcome his wife, Catharina, who in January had stayed behind in Wesel to recuperate after the birth of their son Paul (who lived only two days). The tsar then toured Holland. In Leiden he paid a visit to Boerhaave, who took the tsar and his retinue to the anatomical theatre, where a corpse lay with its muscles exposed, waiting ‘to be impregnated with turpentine’. A witness related that those who had shown signs of disgust at the sight of this revolting object were rebuked by the tsar in a most unusual way: as punishment they were forced to tear loose a muscle from the corpse with their teeth.19 At the university library the tsar saw Christiaan Huygens’s sphaera movens. He and Erskine then went to Delft before travelling via Rotterdam and Dordrecht to France, where the tsar was to meet the French regent, the Duke of Orléans.

17

AW 1007. Merian’s original watercolour drawings of insects later came into the hands of Hans Sloane. 19 Meerman, Discours, 68–69. 18

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Robert Erskine had spoken to Ruysch about the purchase of his collection and the scientific aspects of his preparations.20 He had urged Ruysch to reveal his secret, for he wished to know everything Ruysch knew about arterial injection, the preservation of specimens and the embalming of bodies. For this knowledge, however, Ruysch had initially demanded the exorbitant price of 50,000 guilders, though he and Erskine eventually agreed on a lower price. By now Erskine and the tsar had departed, so the completion of the purchase was left to Albert Seba, to whom Erskine had given special authorization, and to Laurens Blumentrost, a young Russian physician. Ruysch was well acquainted with Blumentrost, who had attended his course on the blood vessels and internal organs the summer before. Blumentrost had studied in Halle, Oxford and Leiden, and had met the famous scholar Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, who had given him a letter of introduction, which enabled him to attend the lectures given in Paris by the anatomist Duverney, with whom Erskine, too, had studied. In late August, Blumentrost had gone to Paris, where he discovered something new: artificial anatomical models made of wax. ‘The human body is perfectly imitated in a marvellous way. One can have the whole of it in wax’, he wrote enthusiastically. ‘There is nothing more useful or more attractive for a cabinet.’21 When he returned to Amsterdam, Blumentrost received a letter from his former teacher, Herman Boerhaave, who wrote: ‘Sir, I have the honour of congratulating you on the most wonderful purchase in the world. There is nothing like it under the sun.’ Boerhaave wrote that he had done his utmost to bring about the sale, because he was convinced that the buyer was worthy of the collection. He hoped that the tsar would enjoy the treasures for as long as it had taken Ruysch to assemble them. First, however, it was necessary to get the collection out of Ruysch’s house. ‘I know him’, said Boerhaave, who warned Blumentrost that the old man would not lift a finger to help. He thought that no fewer than five hundred crates would be needed for the entire collection, and advised settling matters as quickly as possible, because

20 21

See AW 1058. Driessen, Kunstkamera, 76, 138, 139.

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Ruysch was nearly eighty, after all, and if he were to die unexpectedly, the deal might be called off.22 On 8 April, in the presence of the Amsterdam notary Abraham Tzeeuwen, the contract was signed between Frederik Ruysch and Erskine’s proxies: Laurens Blumentrost and Albert Seba. For 30,000 guilders Ruysch agreed to sell ‘all the anatomical and botanical specimens, as well as the marine plants and other rarities’ that were in his possession. He also sold ‘the written secrets . . . how and in what way the same must be prepared and preserved, holding back nothing’. He undertook to give Seba the description of his method and to supply Blumentrost with instructions. Ruysch promised he would ‘not reveal to anyone in the world how such rarities were prepared and preserved, much less give any instructions or communications, without the permission of the oft-mentioned Mr Areskine’. Blumentrost and Erskine promised to pay Ruysch 25,000 guilders in cash within six weeks. When all the specimens had been handed over, he would be given the remaining 5,000 guilders, for which Seba stood surety.23 A copy of the contract was sent to Erskine in Paris. When Seba and Blumentrost began going every day to Ruysch’s house to pack everything into crates, problems arose immediately. As Boerhaave had predicted, Ruysch did not help at all with the packing, which made it unnecessarily difficult, since what Seba and Blumentrost found in the cabinets did not always tally with the catalogue, and they would have been grateful for Ruysch’s help in identifying the specimens. They were also having trouble accumulating the huge amount of cash needed to pay Ruysch. Before leaving Amsterdam, Erskine had given Seba a bank draught for 30,000 guilders, to be presented to Pieter Guenellon, who was to act as intermediary. Seba had hoped that Guenellon would have ‘ready money’, but this was not the case. Guenellon had to finance the payments through bills of exchange, and he said it would take him more than six weeks to get the money together. Seba, who had undertaken to pay Ruysch within six weeks, now had a problem, which he reported to Erskine on 15 April, at the same time asking whether Ruysch’s

22

Boerhaave, Corr. III, 176. Amsterdam City Archives, notarial archive 7598, notary Abraham Tzeeuwen, fol. 323, 8 April 1717. Jozien Driessen, who discovered the archives, gives a detailed account of the purchase of the collections of Seba and Ruysch in De Kunstkamera van Peter de Grote. 23

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collection should be sent to St Petersburg together with his shipment of medicines for the apothecary of the Russian admiralty, and whether the entire shipment should be insured all the way to St Petersburg. Two days later Blumentrost and Seba went with the notary Abraham Tzeeuwen to the house on the Bloemgracht, where they were told that Ruysch was not at home. Tzeeuwen then read Maria Post a summons, ordering Ruysch to hand over the description of his secret method. The notary reiterated that Erskine had given Seba written orders to ensure that Ruysch deliver to either Seba or the notary the description of his method—sealed, ‘complete and lacking nothing, bona fide and written with his own hand’. Seba and Blumentrost were worried about the confidentiality of Ruysch’s secret, for if it should prove to be known to his son or anyone else, it would constitute a breach of contract and the sale could not go through. Moreover, it was proving difficult to gain access to the collection, so Blumentrost asked for the keys to the rooms housing the cabinets, and announced his intention to have the rooms sealed after every packing session. Maria Post listened to what the notary had to say, confirmed that she had heard it all, and asked for a copy of his statement.24 Meanwhile Erskine had written from Paris to say that he was satisfied with the contract, but surprised at the proviso that Ruysch reveal his secret to Blumentrost as well. Blumentrost hastened to explain that he had had the clause inserted to be on the safe side, in case Erskine could not return to Amsterdam, since he was required, as the tsar’s personal physician, to accompany him wherever he went. All the same, the notary drew up a new version of the contract, which was signed on 23 April. In the meantime, Ruysch had agreed to give Seba a sealed copy of his secret method. Seba reported to Erskine that he had still heard nothing from Ruysch about his method, but had not pressed him, because Ruysch and his family had behaved much more reasonably since the notarial act had been drawn up. Seba and Blumentrost hoped to finish the packing by mid-May. By the end of April, the anatomical specimens had all been packed, and Blumentrost had recorded them in a notebook. In the case of the ten cabinets with published catalogues, the administrative work was relatively easy, but there were a number of cabinets whose contents had never been catalogued.

24 Amsterdam City Archives, notarial archive 7598, notary Tzeeuwen, fol. 395, 17 April 1717.

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Among these were a number of ‘theme cabinets’, including a cabinet with nothing but hearts and another with bones, as well as the famous cabinet featuring the stages of human development, the thesaurus anthropogeniam.25 Still to be packed were the butterflies and shells, of which there were too many to catalogue (the same was true of the uncatalogued anatomical cabinets), so the specimens they contained were merely counted. On 13 May, Blumentrost thought that he would need another week to complete packing what would probably amount to between fifty and sixty crates. From Calais they received orders from Erskine not to ship the collection until there was a convoy going to St Petersburg. Seba replied that no more convoys would be sailing to St Petersburg that year, and suggested that, for safety’s sake, the collection be distributed over two or three ships. The deadline for paying Ruysch was drawing near. Guenellon had a bill of exchange, but maintained that he could not redeem it without express orders from Erskine, who had not replied to his last two letters. In an effort to put pressure on Guenellon, Seba and Blumentrost went to his house, but were told that he had been out of town for several days. They appealed to Christoffel Brants, who condemned Guenellon’s conduct but could do no more than offer to speak to him as soon as he returned. By then the six weeks would be up, however, and that would reflect badly on the reputation and creditworthiness of Seba and Blumentrost. Blumentrost wrote to Erskine (who was still in Paris) to ask for advice. Meanwhile Ruysch had given a written description of his secret method to a notary. Shortly afterward Guenellon turned up, and—after Brants had had a serious word with him—he gave Brants 10,000 guilders on 21 May. To induce him to deliver the rest of the money, Seba showed him a letter from Erskine in Paris, but Guenellon said that the bills of exchange had not yet fallen due, so he did not have the full amount at his disposal. He promised to pay the rest very soon. Seba then gave Ruysch 10,000 guilders and a bill of exchange worth 15,000 guilders, and in return received the sealed envelop with Ruysch’s secret.

25

Akademia Nauk Archives, St Petersburg, razriad IV, op.1, n.108.

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The transaction was now practically complete, and nothing stood in the way of the collection’s departure for far-off St Petersburg.26 Boerhaave expressed his disappointment in a letter to Sloane, saying that he thought it a great pity that the Royal Society had let slip the opportunity to buy Ruysch’s collection. At the time the asking price had been a fraction of its actual value, and Boerhaave was sorry that the British had not taken advantage of the offer, after he had seen to it that they were given the right of first refusal. Now Ruysch had sold his life’s work for a much higher price to the tsar.27 Nevertheless, Ruysch regretted not having demanded more money when he heard that Levinus Vincent was asking at least 50,000 guilders for his collection. ‘I was completely mistaken about the value of my collection’, Ruysch said, ‘and was stupid enough to ask only 30,000 guilders for it. If I had originally asked 60,000 guilders (which everyone estimated my collection to be worth), I would have received at least 40,000 guilders. But because the deal has been done, I shall be honest enough not to go back on my word . . . Anyway, I’m glad to turn my collection over to His Imperial Highness. I like him better than any other monarch. His Highness and I have been friends for many years; indeed, when I had the honour of receiving His Highness at my home, he deigned to shake my hand, and said: “You are my teacher from the olden days.”’28 Ruysch trusted that his preparations would be well preserved, because he had personally given the tsar instructions to this effect. Ruysch knew that the tsar had learned a lot about anatomy at his lessons, so much so that he was able to discuss it in a way that amazed everyone.29 According to Ruysch, the tsar surpassed other princes and even many physicians with his extraordinary knowledge of anatomical matters.30 After visiting France, the tsar returned to Amsterdam in early July, having added to his retinue a Calais-born giant named Bourgeois, who was seven and a half feet tall. The tsar went to see Nicolaas Witsen as he lay dying, and was even present at his death. Before returning to Russia, he purchased more books and paintings, having previously consulted Witsen, Ruysch and several other learned gentlemen about

26 27 28 29 30

Driessen, Kunstkamera, 138–144. Corr. Boerhaave I, 175. Radziun, Anatomische collectie, 52. AW 1099. AW 1057.

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which books should be translated into Russian.31 The painter Georg Gsell was commissioned to copy portraits of Seba and Ruysch.32 Boerhaave informed Sloane that the sale of the Ruysch Collection was definite, and that the tsar had also bought the secret of Ruysch’s preparation method. As soon as word got out that Ruysch had sold his secret along with his specimens, the chase for his preparation method was on, with the French at the head of the pack. In Paris, Robert Erskine had spoken of the sale to Louis-Léon Pajot, comte d’Ons-enBray, director of the post, whom Erskine and the tsar had visited on 22 May to view his famous collection. As a young man Pajot had travelled to Holland, and had been there at the time of the tsar’s first visit. He had also gone to see Ruysch. Pajot’s country house near Bercy was wholly dedicated to nature research. He had set up laboratories, built and collected machines, and amassed a unique collection. Erskine supposedly promised that as soon as he was back in Holland he would send Pajot the two secret recipes: one for Ruysch’s preservative fluid and the other for his arterial-injection fluid. The count also wanted some objects from Ruysch’s collection, and told Erskine that if there were duplicates, he could entrust them to the Amsterdam postmaster Six, who would ship them to France. He would, of course, be prepared to send something in return. ‘I give you my word that no one will get the recipes from me, and they will remain my secret, if you give them to me on this condition’, Pajot said in a letter to Erskine.33 The anatomist Duverney, who in recent years had received a number of students from Amsterdam, also showed an interest in Ruysch’s method and preparations. Evidently the contact with students from Amsterdam had fuelled French interest in Dutch methods of preparation. Duverney bought Swammerdam’s unpublished manuscripts, which had gone through Thévenot’s hands before ending up with the painter Jean Joubert, who had depicted the flora and fauna in the Jardin du Roi. Duverney bought them from Joubert’s heirs, not in order to publish them, but in the hope that they would prove useful to him. The surgeon Pierre-Simon Rouhault, a member of the Académie des Sciences, experimented with the injection of blood vessels in the manner of Swammerdam and Ruysch. He used a waxy mixture, but did not

31 32 33

Scheltema, Peter II, 53. Von Stählin, Anecdoten I, 75. Driessen, Kunstkamera, 145–146.

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succeed in filling the smallest vessels, because the substance hardened too quickly. Duverney tried to exploit the interest shown by the tsar and Erskine in the anatomical wax models Blumentrost had written about. He offered to help them procure wax models and to do what he could to expedite the tsar’s election to the Académie des Sciences. In the meantime, though, he kept on trying to wangle Ruysch’s secret and some of his preparations out of them. Erskine had led him to believe that he would be receiving a few of Ruysch’s specimens, and Duverney promised Erskine that they would be displayed in a cabinet inscribed with ‘Ex Dono Domini Aresquine’ in golden letters. ‘I assure you that this present will do you much honour, and that the foreigners who all want to see the Room of Skeletons will learn that you are the owner of this rich and magnificent anatomical cabinet.’ He asked Erskine to give his regards to Ruysch, and asked whether Ruysch was still working as diligently as ever. He said he was thinking of making a journey to Amsterdam, his health permitting, to see Ruysch’s collection, perhaps in the company of Ruysch himself, before it left the country.34 The wax models made by the surgeon Guillaume Desnoues were universally said to be ‘as good as real’ and were viewed in Paris ‘with the utmost wonder’.35 Though they were gaining in popularity in England too, they were not as practical as Ruysch’s preparations, at least not in the opinion of the Irish ‘enthusiast’ John Percival, who described one of Ruysch’s preserved corpses in 1718: ‘Very lately he made a present to our Royal Society of a body preserved in pickle, which is very curious and far exceeds in its use to surgeons and physicians the waxwork that came not long ago from France, and was publicly shown in London. The liquor wherein he preserves the bodies is a secret not yet communicated to the world, but answers perfectly well the design.’36 Ruysch was aware that he possessed a unique skill. Indeed, it was not at all certain that the sale of his ‘recipes’ had resulted in the revelation of his secret. It remained to be seen whether knowledge of how to mix his liquor balsamicus and the waxy substance he used in arterial injection would enable others to make preparations as well as he did. Ruysch was convinced that his art was his and his alone: ‘Everyone I’ve

34 35 36

Letters from Pajot and Duverney to Erskine; Driessen, Kunstkamera, 146–147. Heister, Redenvoering over den aanwas der ontleedkunde, 97. British Library, Add. MS 47059 (quoted in Van Strien, Touring, 82).

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asked and everything I’ve heard has led me to believe that there is no one else who has really mastered it. Dr Blumentrost, who studied for a time with the anatomist Duverney in Paris, says that that extremely celebrated man does not have sufficient knowledge of it either and that his preparations are suspect. I am not embarrassed to say that anyone who had only my knowledge, and no earthly possessions whatsoever, would in my eyes be very rich and ensured of a good life for the rest of his days.’37 The Collection Moves East The day of the tsar’s departure was nearing. In August he visited Hoorn, the Beemster, ’t Loo, Zaandam and Texel, where a fleet returning from India had put into harbour. In Amsterdam he paid another visit to the Hortus, where he was shown around by two commissioners, while his wife was accompanied by ladies from the commissioners’ families. One of them, Maria Schaep, later described the tsar’s visit in a letter to a friend: ‘The tsar looks at all the plants, trees and herbs very closely, as though he were a gardener, and makes notes of everything that pleases him, and walks like a savage, uncouth person. He is very messy and slovenly, and eats very sloppily, hawks and spits on the carpets, and his retinue follow him around without respect; yet the tsarina is reasonably neat and clean, and knows a great many trees and herbs; she took great pleasure in the herb “touch-me-not” [Mimosa Pudica, or Sensitive Plant], which closes when one touches it.’38 The tsar left on 31 August, after holding a farewell audience. At the end of September he was in Berlin. Before the year was out he was invited to become a member of the Académie des Sciences, thanks to the efforts of Duverney, who kept urging Erskine to send him some of Ruysch’s preparations. Erskine only answered that the tsar had decreed that his subjects were to turn over to him all children born with

37

Radziun, Anatomische collectie, 51–52. Verster, Peter de Groote, 40–41. During his stay in Amsterdam, the tsar lived in the house on the Herengracht that had been rented by the Russian mercantile agent Osip Solovyov, who went to stay for the duration of the tsar’s visit at his country house in the Haarlemmer Hout. The owner of the premises on the Herengracht later wrote that his house had been so damaged by the tsar and his retinue that he had had to ‘foot the bill for several thousand guilders’ worth of repairs and restoration’ (Vier eeuwen Heerengracht). 38

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deformities and other curious phenomena. Failing to do so would result in a fine, but complying with his orders would earn one a reward. The tsar issued instructions for these specimens to be preserved in alcohol until such time as they could be handed over to the authorities. By collecting deformed babies and foetuses, he hoped to make a contribution to science. He explained that such abnormal creatures were not ‘monsters’ but ‘freaks of nature’; they should not be considered the work of the devil, because the devil did not exist. The tsar had learned from Ruysch—and even stated it in his decree—that congenital defects were caused either by an internal malfunction or by fears felt by the mother during pregnancy. Erskine told Duverney nothing about the preparations, however, because Ruysch’s collection was all packed up and waiting to be shipped from Amsterdam. It would have to spend the winter there, since it would be spring before any ships would be sailing in the direction of St Petersburg. Erskine told Pajot, who continued to hound him, why he had not been able to send him any specimens from Ruysch’s collection. By the time Erskine returned to Amsterdam, the collection had been packed up: ‘It was impossible to search all the crates to find the pieces we selected for you.’39 He promised to send a few specimens in the summer, by which time the collection should have arrived in St Petersburg. In early May 1718, Erskine gave permission for the collection to be sent to St Petersburg on the summer ships. He wrote in German to Seba, to relay the tsar’s instructions: the crates should be insured, and divided up among a number of ships. The tsar wanted the crates with the preparations showing the human reproductive cycle and the development of the embryo to be sent separately, and shipped at the first reliable opportunity to Lübeck. His message did not reach Seba until 3 June, however, by which time the entire collection had been loaded onto two ships: the Juffrouw Anna Maria of Captain Jan Pietersz Vettevogel and the Stad Coningsbergen of Captain Wiebe Sieuwertsz, the only two ships sailing to St Petersburg and likewise the carriers of the medicine Seba was sending there.

39 Erskine to Duverney, St Petersburg, 14 April 1718; Erskine to Pajot, St Petersburg, 14 April 1718; Driessen, Kunstkamera, 149–152.

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While still in Amsterdam, Seba had given a great deal of thought to the best way of dealing with the customs officers. He begged them to consider that the shipment contained the Ruysch Collection, which was destined for the tsar, whereupon they had turned a blind eye to his declaration of the consignment’s value as 3,000 guilders. While the ships were waiting for favourable winds and the convoy that would allow them to set sail for Russia, in St Petersburg work had begun on the museum that would house Ruysch’s and Seba’s collections. It was far from ready in early July, when Vettevogel’s ship arrived. Erskine and Blumentrost were away with the tsar, so pending their return the sealed crates were placed in Erskine’s house. At the end of July, Schumacher (Erskine’s assistant) informed Erskine that the second ship had not yet arrived, and asked what he should do with the cargo from the first ship. He wondered if he should open the crates, since they had been closed for so long that they might be full of vermin. On 8 August, Schumacher wrote to Seba to tell him that both ships had arrived and that they had unloaded the last of the goods from Wiebe Sieuwertsz’s ship only the previous day. He had been relieved to find that Ruysch’s collection had not suffered any damage. So was the tsar, who had arrived in St Petersburg the day before. According to Schumacher’s account, when the tsar heard that the collection had arrived without mishap, he embraced the captain. When Erskine finally returned to St Petersburg at the beginning of September, he complained that he had not had a moment to himself. When not on board a ship, he had been sitting in a tent, in unremittingly wretched conditions. On 5 September he wrote to Seba: ‘Returned from my journey only two nights ago, so have had no time to see either Professor Ruysch’s cabinet or what you sent me.’ Two weeks later he was dead.40 In the meantime, a few of Ruysch’s preparations had finally made it to Paris. They had been entrusted to Rouhault, who had had some success in injecting arteries with fish glue dissolved in water. His close study of Ruysch’s preparations had led him to suspect that they did not contain any wax, and that his own manner of injection was not so very different from Ruysch’s.41

40 41

Driessen, Kunstkamera, 153, 183–184. Daubenton, Pièces d’anatomie injectées, 138.

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Starting the following year, in 1719, the collections of Seba and Ruysch could be marvelled at in temporary accommodations. In 1720 a member of a Polish delegation wrote an account of his visit to the collections: ‘One enters a room with a great number of bottles displayed in cabinets. They contain the heads of small children—from newborn to three years old. They have remained so fresh in the alcohol that they appear to be living . . . Other bottles contain hands and feet, adorned with pieces of lace, as though they were alive. In the next room, bottles are lined up with examples of every stage of the unborn human foetus—from conception to the moment of birth.’ The animal preparations, preserved in bottles, were just as numerous as the human specimens, noted the Polish visitor, who had heard about the plan to move the collection to a palace that was being built on an island.42 That palace was the Kunstkamera, at that time under construction on Vasilevski Island in the River Neva. The Kunstkamera—which did not open until 1728, three years after the death of Tsar Peter—was the first public museum in Russia intended to promote science and learning. (In 1708 Leibniz had stressed the desirability of such a museum in a memorandum to the tsar.) It contained a library, an anatomical theatre and the collections. Ruysch’s later biographer, Johann Friedrich Schreiber, considered the Kunstkamera a museum without equal in the world, and had particular praise for its collection of embryos. To those disinclined or unable to make the journey, he suggested reading Ruysch’s catalogue, but he thought that seeing the collection with one’s own eyes was ample reward for the long journey. Ruysch was pleased that his collection had ended up with the tsar: ‘I am happy that it has found accommodation at the court of the monarch who has hardly a peer among all the princes of Europe, if one observes the unflagging diligence with which he explores natural science. It is scarcely to be credited that there was ever such a great monarch, who—with such kind-heartedness, goodwill, patience and courtesy—questioned all good artists about their art and listened to their stories, their answers, their instruction! How inquisitive—even humble—he proved to be, not only as a listener, but also as a pupil, behaving thus towards every famous master in all branches of the arts! 42 Radziun, Anatomische collectie, 52. In 1724 Ruysch’s thesauri were translated by the surgeon Maxim Satarov from Latin into Russian for the benefit of Russian students. In 1728 the anatomical preparations were catalogued by Josias Weitbrecht.

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Twenty years ago he likewise wanted me to teach him about the workings of the human body, at which time he listened very attentively; he questioned me closely about all kinds of things, and always remembered everything he had seen.’43

43

AW 1007.

CHAPTER EIGHT

REPRODUCTION In the summer of 1695, Johann Wilhelm, Elector Palatine, visited Frederik Ruysch’s museum, where he undoubtedly saw paintings by Ruysch’s daughters, particularly those done by Rachel. At this time Rachel had just given birth to her first child, but motherhood had not prevented her from continuing her career as a painter. Her sister Anna had given up painting when she married, but Rachel had carried on, and could meanwhile demand high prices for her flower still lifes. In 1699 her success was formally recognized when she became the first woman elected to membership in Pictura, the painters’ confraternity in The Hague. In 1656 the Hague painters had withdrawn from the Guild of St Luke, having been prompted to do so by ‘arrogance’, according to their former guild-brothers, who included the house-painters and decorators. The new society was limited to ‘artist-painters’, sculptors, engravers and a few art lovers. According to the new confraternity’s rules and regulations, the guildhall was to be decorated with the members’ own paintings. On 4 June 1701, the painter Jurriaan Pool presented the confraternity with a flower piece by his wife, Rachel Ruysch. Painters often gave a work on loan, but this painting was donated to Pictura, and a subsequent inventory of its possessions listed ‘an especially fine flower painting by Miss Rachel Ruysch’.1 Rachel Many of Rachel Ruysch’s clients were wealthy. The high prices she charged them enabled her to concentrate on only a few pieces a year, each of which took several months to complete. Orders for paintings intended to mark a special occasion had to be placed well in advance. In 1708 Rachel was offered a position as court painter to Johann Wilhelm, Elector Palatine. Her father, who was visited that

1

Obreen, Archief kunstgeschiedenis IV, 211.

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year by two of the Elector’s personal physicians, promptly dedicated his following thesaurus to him. Johann Wilhelm, Elector Palatine since 1690, and his wife, Anna Maria de’ Medici, had brought various artists to their court in Düsseldorf, where they had built up such a respectable collection that the city was described as a miniature Rome. At first the Elector and his wife had focused on furniture, coins and medals, but eventually their collection branched out to include sculptures and paintings. One of the first painters to enter their service was Eglon van der Neer, whose younger brother Pieter, a diamond cutter, was married to a sister-inlaw of Frederik Ruysch. Among the artists who had been summoned to Düsseldorf were various other Dutch masters, including Gerard de Lairesse. Rachel Ruysch, meanwhile the mother of several children, was reluctant to move to Düsseldorf, and was thus released from the obligation to reside at court. Other court painters, such as Adriaen van der Werff and Jan Weenix, were also employed on this basis. Rachel was given an annual allowance, in return for which she was only required to produce one painting a year for the Elector’s collection. Although Rachel occasionally made the journey to Düsseldorf to deliver her paintings, she continued to live in Amsterdam with her husband, Jurriaan Pool, and their children. Even though she was nearly thirty when she married, she gave birth to ten children. The last one—a boy, born when she was forty-seven—was named Jan Willem, after her patron. The Elector and his wife agreed to act as godparents, and when Rachel took the child to Düsseldorf to present him to the Elector and his wife, Johann Wilhelm gave the boy a costly medallion on a red ribbon, and Rachel a dressing table with twenty-eight silver accessories in an elegant toiletry case, as well as six silver sconces. In the spring of 1711, Rachel Ruysch and Jurriaan Pool were paid a visit by the Von Uffenbach brothers, one of whom—Zacharias Conrad—recounted their impressions in his travel journal. Although Pool himself was no mean portrait painter, the Uffenbachs had gone mainly to see the work of Rachel, the daughter of the famous anatomist. Zacharias described her as a woman of forty, not especially pretty, but extremely cultivated. ‘Both the husband and wife were very courteous, but also very boastful, in a typical Dutch way.’ Perhaps they had thought Rachel was flaunting her possessions when she showed them the silver the Elector had given her on her last visit to Düsseldorf.2 2

Uffenbach, Merkwürdige Reisen, III, 627–628.

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As it turned out, the Uffenbachs saw two finished paintings at Rachel’s, one of flowers and the other of fruit, intended for Pieter de la Court van der Voort, a cloth merchant in Leiden, who had paid 1,500 guilders for the two works.3 Von Uffenbach thought them very fine, ‘with particularly delicate brushwork’. Jurriaan Pool claimed that Rachel’s technique surpassed that of all masters, past and present. She was working on two small, square panel paintings for Cosimo de’ Medici—the Grand Duke of Tuscany, the Elector’s father-in-law—for which the Elector was paying her a fee over and above her salary as court painter.4 When the Uffenbachs visited her, she was applying the ground to these two panels; in their words, ‘she sat there just like a painter’. The German travellers saw that Rachel made her paintings from life, hence the ‘birds’ nests, insects and suchlike lying about’. The Elector commissioned Jurriaan Pool to paint a portrait of Rachel. He turned it into a family portrait, showing Rachel and himself with Jan Willem, displaying the medallion he had been given by the Elector. In 1716, when the painting was finished and ready for shipment, they received word of the Elector’s death. Rachel thus lost her patron, but there was no need to despair, because her solid reputation assured her of more than enough commissions. Writing in 1721 about the flower paintings of Abraham Minjon, Arnold Houbraken remarked that they were well worth looking at, and would have increased in value, ‘if only the exquisite brush of Miss R. Ruysch and J. van Huysum had not succeeded in imitating nature even more closely, giving such objects yet more lustre’.5 Jurriaan Pool stopped painting and became a lace trader. From 1723 the family had no financial worries whatsoever. Because the Dutch system of taxation did not benefit enough from the population’s wealth, the government held a lottery from time to time to augment its revenues. In 1713 Jurriaan Pool and Rachel Ruysch had won 200 guilders in one such lottery. In December 1722 they bought, together with their son George, a 10-guilder lot, number 60623, which won them the first 3 Later that year Pieter’s son Allard de la Court married Catharina Backer, his cousin, who was also a talented painter. The Irish politician John Percival saw Rachel’s paintings at the house of Pieter de la Court during his journey through Holland in the summer of 1718. ‘There are several pieces of flowers and fruit by Mrs. Ruysch . . . which are excellent in their kind; her price is according’ (see Van Strien, Touring). 4 The Elector presented a number of Rachel’s works to his father-in-law, the Grand Duke of Tuscany, for his famous collection. Two works by Rachel—large paintings dating from 1716—are in the Palazzo Pitti in Florence. 5 Houbraken, Groote Schouburgh III, 65.

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prize of 75,000 guilders.6 After taxes it was still worth 60,000 guilders, twice as much as Frederik Ruysch received from the tsar for the collection that had been his life’s work. In any case, Rachel, who was approaching sixty, could now afford to paint for her own pleasure. Collecting the prize money proved to be problematic, however, because George was twenty-one and thus not legally of age, yet he had paid his half of the lottery ticket with his own money and therefore had a right to 30,000 guilders. Eventually he received written confirmation that he could do whatever he wished with his share. In any case, he did not have much time to enjoy the prize money, because he died three years later. He was the second adult son Rachel Ruysch and Jurriaan Pool had lost, for in 1720 their son Abraham had gone to Surinam (Dutch Guiana) at the age of twenty-two in the service of the Dutch West India Company and died a short time later.7 A Dutiful Father Rachel’s success story is in stark contrast to the sad fate of her younger sister Pieternel. Shortly before Rachel’s appointment as court painter, in the spring of 1708, Pieternel died at the age of thirty-seven, four months after giving birth for the seventh time. Her last child was a boy, who had been named Frederik, as had a previous son who had died. Pieternel’s husband, Jan Munnicks, was thirty-five when his wife died. He had spent twenty years working for the Hortus as a draughtsman and painter, but people had taken notice of him mainly for other reasons. On various occasions he had acted as a spokesman for the Amsterdam apothecaries, who had complained to the Collegium Medicum and the burgomasters about the sale of medicines by unauthorized persons. But his credibility had been jeopardized when a complaint was lodged with the Collegium Medicum by a midwife, who said that he had tried to induce a birth with medicines, whereas the midwife had advised him to consult Frederik Ruysch.8

6 Amsterdam City Archives, notarial archive 5777, notary Laurens van Gangel, 26 August 1723. 7 Amsterdam City Archives, notarial archive 5777, notary Laurens van Gangel, 2 June 1723. 8 Amsterdam City Archives, Collegium Medicum archive 33, 13 March 1704.

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Jan Munnicks died five months after his wife, leaving a number of young children. In his will, Munnicks named Frederik Ruysch and Jurriaan Pool as guardians, but they were reluctant to assume the task. They knew that Munnicks was in debt and doubted whether his assets would offset his liabilities, so they promised to exert themselves on behalf of his children and to give him a proper burial, while retaining the right to refuse his estate. Munnicks’s estate was not clear-cut in any case, because his death had been preceded by years of quarrels and lawsuits, one of which concerned the estate of an aunt, Geertruid Munnicks. Jan, the executor of her will, was one of the heirs, as were his sisters, four of whom were still underage and thus dependent on him for administering their portion. His elder sister, who was married to a notary in Utrecht, had been struck from the will, but continued to fight for what she considered her legal share of the inheritance. At one point her husband had Jan Munnicks arrested and his assets seized. All these conflicts meant that when Munnicks died, his aunt’s estate had still not been settled, and it was not at all clear how much money his children would eventually have at their disposal. The children were looked after, of course, but Frederik Ruysch and Jurriaan Pool exercised great caution in winding up the estate, which took several years. Creditors were paid and outstanding debts collected (sometimes after numerous reminders), Munnicks’s apothecary shop was sold, a new situation was found for his servant, and his aunt’s estate was at last divided up, with 3,000 guilders going to his children collectively, who all this time had been living at Ruysch’s house on the Bloemgracht.9 By now Frederik Ruysch and Maria Post had only two unmarried daughters to look after, since twenty-four-year-old Maria Jacoba had married the paint merchant Jan Heijn in 1706.10 In 1713 thirty-five-year-old

9 Amsterdam City Archives, Collegium Medicum archive 3, 30 October 1708, 9 July 1709; notarial archive 7479, notary Cornelis van Alderwerelt, 2 August 1708, 29 August 1708, 3 September 1708, 25 September 1708, 20 October 1708; notarial archive 7481, 17 February 1710, 31 May 1710; notarial archive 5627, notary Johan Commelin, 29 July 1705; notarial archive 5631, 21 February 1709; notarial archive 5632, 5 December 1710. Anna Maria Munnicks, who lived on the Bloemgracht, appeared before officials on 8 May 1721 with her grandfather Frederik Ruysch to register her marriage to Gerard van Spal. 10 Amsterdam City Archives, notarial archive 5770, notary Laurens van Gangel, 15 October 1706.

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Lucretia also married (a widower, the merchant Jeremias Pelt), after which the only children Frederik Ruysch had to provide for were his twenty-nine-year-old daughter Elisabeth and the children of Pieternel. Ruysch had always spent a great deal of money on his anatomical pursuits, but he had been able to do so because he had assured himself of an adequate income. His earnings were based on his work as a physician and lecturer, as well as on other positions he had managed to secure over the years. In 1667 he had started as praelector with an annual salary of 350 guilders. When he was appointed to a professorship two years later, his salary was raised to 750 guilders. He had subsequently assumed a host of other duties: as forensic physician he earned 150 guilders a year, and as professor of botany 400 guilders. As the municipal obstetrician, moreover, he was required to teach anatomy to the midwives as well as to conduct their examinations, for which he was paid separately. He also derived an income from his medical practice and his private pupils, and from the entrance fees to his museum and the profit he made trading in ‘rarities’. Altogether his annual income must have amounted to at least 2,000 guilders, if not considerably more, but every year he spent at least 200 guilders on the alcohol needed to preserve his specimens, and an additional (and certainly not negligible) sum on the general maintenance of his collection. In fact, he depended on the income from his various positions simply to maintain his family and to finance his anatomical research. Of Ruysch’s paid positions, that of municipal obstetrician had continued to be lucrative, owing to the benefits derived from his exclusive knowledge of several obstetrical instruments. In spite of past conflicts, which had highlighted the disadvantages of keeping such knowledge exclusive, Amsterdam still had only a few physicians who were familiar with those instruments and knew how to use them. In addition to Frederik Ruysch, these experts had originally included Rogier van Roonhuijsen (the son of Ruysch’s predecessor as municipal obstetrician) and Andries Boekelman, Ruysch’s co-worker, who handled the instruments according to Ruysch’s instructions. Van Roonhuijsen, Ruysch and Boekelman had agreed to keep secret the knowledge and skill they possessed, which gave them a vital edge on their competitors. Naturally there was criticism of their secrecy, but they took little notice of it. After all, no one suffered from their policy: anyone seeking good obstetrical help could have it. Besides, their secrecy ensured that

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their instruments would not fall into the hands of bunglers. Indeed, there was a very real chance of that, since obstetrics was no more than an informal specialization, requiring no particular training or examination. In theory, anyone who had a surgeon’s diploma was qualified to practise obstetrics, but to do it properly, special skills were necessary, and these could be acquired only from an experienced obstetrician. A surgeon who wished to practise obstetrics therefore had to find an established master who would take him under his wing and teach him everything he knew. This was easier said than done. Ruysch and Boekelman passed their knowledge on to their sons. Rogier van Roonhuijsen (who had been trained by his father) had no son, but he trained a number of other surgeons, thus preparing them to take over his practice. Trainees had to pay a lot to receive instruction from Van Roonhuijsen, because they were in effect paying for the great advantage they would one day have over their competitors. In 1709, when Rogier van Roonhuijsen feared he was going to die, he and Ruysch agreed that he would be allowed to pass on their secret to two of his pupils, the surgeons Pieter Plaatman and Johannes de Bruijn. A notary drew up a document which stipulated that Frederik Ruysch, Cornelis Boekelman (who had meanwhile taken over the practice from his late father) and Rogier van Roonhuijsen would share their exclusive knowledge with Plaatman and De Bruijn, who would pay a certain amount for this privilege.11 What they did not know was that Rogier van Roonhuijsen’s secret was no longer a secret. Van Roonhuijsen had once promised to train his oldest pupil, Van der Swam, in both ordinary surgery and obstetrics, but he had not kept his promise. Van der Swam, who often heard people speak of his master’s famous instrument, noticed that it was always wrapped up carefully in a chamois cloth that was changed every evening. He knew that when Van Roonhuijsen was assisting at a birth, he kept his instrument hidden beneath a blanket. Van der Swam had been trying for years to catch a glimpse of it. One day a burgomaster came to consult Van Roonhuijsen on some matter, just when he was returning from a delivery, so he quickly put his instrument in another room and went to meet the burgomaster. Van der Swam took advantage of this opportunity to go in search of the mysterious instrument, which he found in a bag,

11

See Geyl, Geschiedenis.

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covered in fresh blood. It was not difficult for him to make a drawing of it, because it was, as he noted, of a simple construction.12 Six months after his obstetrical secret had been sold, Rogier van Roonhuijsen died. When Van der Swam subsequently told Cornelis Boekelman that he had seen the instrument, Boekelman was angry, but afterwards relieved when Van der Swam seemed in no hurry to tell anyone about it. For decades obstetrical instruments continued to be shrouded in secrecy. In the mid-eighteenth century, the question of whether it was ethical to keep a remedy secret for reasons of personal gain became an issue of public debate, but in 1700, such behaviour was perfectly acceptable. Exclusive knowledge or skill was a means of subsistence; no one would have been expected to divulge information that would benefit one’s competitors. This was as true of recipes for cure-alls as it was of stone-cutting techniques: in 1694 Pieter Adriaansz entered into an agreement with the stone-cutter Samuel de Lion Benavente, a capable surgeon known for his expertise in the healing of surgical wounds. Pieter Adriaansz promised Benavente one-third of his income from lithotomies if Benavente would teach his son Adriaan Verduijn and his son-in-law Gommer van Bortel ‘everything he knows about stone-cutting operations, both the lithotomy itself and what can be done to help heal the wound after the operation’. Benavente promised to do this, on the condition that they ‘not impart or divulge their knowledge to anyone else’. In future Pieter Adriaansz’s son and sonin-law would share their income from lithotomies with Benavente, who in turn would give one-third of his earnings to the other two. If one of the signatories to the contract were to die, his widow would receive her late husband’s share for two more years, and if one of the signatories wanted to be released from the contract, he could buy himself out for 1,000 guilders.13 Johann Rau, too, kept his stone-cutting technique a secret, and his pupil Jacobus Denijs sold the secret to a successor.14 What was true 12

Rathlauw, Geheim. Amsterdam City Archives, notarial archive Samuel Wijmer, 4 November 1694. Published by Van Zuiden in 1916. Each bit of expert knowledge was thus considered a form of wealth and cashed in on accordingly. Shortly before his death, DeleBoë stipulated ‘that the art of distilling sal volatile shall be left to no one but his niece Miss Anna Maria Rouyer’. 14 On 29 November 1728, in the presence of the notary Cornelis van Alphen in Leiden, Denijs and Herman Meijer agreed that the former would instruct the latter in the art of stone-cutting for a period of one year at a cost of 2,500 guilders. 13

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of obstetrics and stone-cutting was also true of Ruysch’s methods of preparation and preservation. It was unique knowledge, and therefore extremely valuable. Ruysch did not intend to reveal his secret to anyone—except at a price. He was happy to share his anatomical knowledge with others, provided he received the recognition he deserved, but he would divulge only part of the technique that had enabled him to acquire that knowledge. This strategy had made it possible for Ruysch to finance his work and support his family, and in this respect he had fulfilled his duties as a father admirably, for the solid social position he had worked so hard to attain had benefited his family as well. One thing Ruysch did not succeed in doing was perpetuating the family name. All of his married daughters named their eldest sons after him, but this did nothing to pass on the name of his ancestral line. It did not look as though Hendrik would ensure the continuation of the family name either, so Rachel had begun to give her sons the name Ruysch as a second Christian name: her eldest son, for example, was named Frederik Ruysch Pool. Finally, when Rachel had four sons with Ruysch as a middle name, Hendrik married, but his wife died childless five years later, and the name Ruysch eventually died out in Frederik’s branch of the family. Hendrik Ruysch’s Lessons in Obstetrics Hendrik spent his working life as a physician, collector and botanist in the shadow of his father, lending him a hand in his anatomical research and the preparation of specimens, helping him with his correspondence, and assisting him at public anatomy lessons and botany lectures. Hendrik also took partial responsibility for instructing the midwives, a task his father often found difficult. Frederik Ruysch grumbled frequently about the failure of the midwives to attend their compulsory lessons. The Collegium Medicum passed his complaint on to the burgomasters, who implemented a fine for truancy. The measure was necessary, they explained, ‘because a great many midwives and their apprentices absent themselves in all manner of ways from the monthly lessons given by Professor Ruysch, often arriving when the lesson is finished or leaving before it has ended’. The midwives had a ready excuse, of course, because they could always say they were urgently needed at a delivery.

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Once a month, on a Tuesday afternoon, Ruysch gave the midwives a lesson in the anatomical theatre in the Weigh House. Each lesson was devoted to a section of an obstetrical handbook that the midwives were expected to read beforehand. They were also taught to recognize circumstances requiring surgical intervention, and four times a year they witnessed the dissection of a female cadaver which the hospital put at Ruysch’s disposal. These anatomical demonstrations depended on the availability of a female corpse—‘a foreigner or stranger, if possible’, as stated in his contract. When a suitable body became available, a woman was sent round to inform the midwives that they were expected at the anatomical theatre the following day. In the meantime, servants took the corpse from the hospital to the Weigh House, so that Ruysch could prepare the demonstration, while the guild servant sharpened the instruments and gathered together the things he would need: sand, soap, candles, fragrant resin, sawdust, nails and oil of turpentine. One such demonstration was given on 14 November 1712, with eighty-seven midwives in attendance that first day and fifty-three the following day.15 Despite the midwives’ frequent failure to attend lessons, they had become much more professional since Ruysch’s arrival. Before the reorganization undertaken in 1668, midwifery had often been dominated by older women—usually widows—with woefully inadequate training. The younger women now being trained were required not only to spend four years as apprentices, but also to attend Ruysch’s lectures and pass an examination. In the meantime midwifery had become a protected profession, and fines were imposed on those who practised it without a qualification. Moreover, greater attention was paid to the midwives’ code of conduct and to the psychological support they could give to women in labour. Midwives were instructed to behave sensibly and in a professional manner. They were told not to upset women in labour by telling them frightening tales or making alarming gestures, and when they thought surgical intervention necessary, they were supposed to inform the women present, telling them calmly and in plenty of time to summon a doctor. Midwives were not allowed either to hurry along the delivery or to leave in the middle of it to go elsewhere (in the hope of earning more money from another client). Before leaving, they were obliged to help deliver the baby and then

15

Amsterdam University Library, MS I C 38.

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to give both mother and child proper care. A midwife was permitted to leave a delivery in progress only if she had announced beforehand that she had promised to attend another woman as soon as she went into labour. But even in such cases, she could not leave before another midwife had arrived. A midwife who violated the rules was suspended for six weeks, and the sign hanging outside her house, advertising her as a qualified midwife, was confiscated for the duration. Fines were also imposed for falling asleep while attending a woman in labour.16 The knowledge and skill of Amsterdam’s midwives was rated very highly by Jakob Winslow, later a professor in Paris, who had availed himself of their knowledge during his student years in Amsterdam.17 At that time their training consisted mainly in watching an established midwife assist deliveries, but as was the case with the surgeons, that practical experience was accompanied by a course of education provided by the authorities. As Ruysch’s complaints make clear, however, the formal part of the midwives’ education had to be forced upon them, largely because they were unhappy with the traditional methods of instruction. Even though reading skills were required for the examination, studying a handbook was not every midwife’s cup of tea. Frederik Ruysch could impart to his pupils a wealth of practical experience, but his presentation was so cut and dried that having Hendrik shoulder some of the teaching was a relief. Hendrik had worked as his father’s unofficial assistant for years, but now, thanks to his father’s efforts, he was appointed—at the age of nearly forty—to the post of municipal obstetrician alongside his father.18 Though this semi-official position was unsalaried, he was at least authorized to instruct and examine the midwives. This construction was evidently intended to ensure that Hendrik would one day take over his father’s position. Beginning in 1712, Hendrik assumed responsibility for teaching the midwives, which he did along much the same lines as his father had done. His lessons were based on an obstetrical handbook, a Dutch translation of the 1685 publication La pratique des accouchements (The practice of childbirth) by Paul Portal, a Paris surgeon. Hendrik had a copy of the handbook specially bound, so that each printed page faced

16 17 18

Privilegiën collegium medicum, 1 December 1703, 8 January 1704. Winslow, Autobiographie, 35. Amsterdam City Archives, Collegium Medicum archive 72.

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a blank page on which he could make notes.19 The book had more than eighty chapters, each of which treated a different obstetrical problem taken from Portal’s practice. Hendrik discussed two or three chapters at every lesson. Hendrik Ruysch read about Portal’s experiences with great interest. Next to a passage describing the rupture of the uterine wall, he wrote: ‘Oh, how awful! Such ruptures and wounds sometimes cause death.’ In another chapter he made a note to remind himself to show the midwives a purse to make them understand what the mouth of the uterus was like and what happened to it when the uterus became swollen. Hendrik held Portal in high regard, even though he had to correct him once in a while. Pointing out the differences between midwifery as practised in France and the Netherlands, he remarked that Portal prescribed enemas far too often. ‘Is he not afraid of tiring out the new mother?’ he asked himself, and in the margin he wrote: ‘Preserve us from so many enemas.’ He advised against following Portal’s advice in this matter. Nor did he approve of the custom of blowing wine in the baby’s face: ‘Of what use is all that blowing in the eyes, nose and ears? None whatsoever’, he wrote with irritation. Hendrik was surprised to learn that in France, the poor were treated with inexpensive remedies; by contrast, the destitute patients who sought help at Amsterdam’s hospital were given the purest and costliest remedies available. And while Portal regretted that midwives’ training was so short, Hendrik Ruysch assured his pupils that they would be given plenty of time to learn the profession. Adequate instruction was provided to one and all, but to reap the benefit, it was necessary to pay strict attention. Hendrik was obviously a chip off the old block. He described the anatomy of each body part under discussion, occasionally making explicit reference to his father’s work. As an example of nature’s providence, he pointed out that babies are provided with a natural lubricant in the birth canal: ‘It is amazing to see that nature has provided this lubricant, which is nothing but fat and serves to make babies slippery for an easier passage, just as the keels of ships are covered with a greasy substance before they make their maiden voyages.’ In many cases it was best to let nature take its course. After the exodus of both baby and placenta, it was better not to attempt to make the womb fall back into place: that was best left to nature. Nor was it wise to suppress

19

Amsterdam University Library, MS XXI C 18.

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the after-pains, for those contractions were necessary to discharge the blood remaining in the uterus. Insisting that nature had to be given a chance to run its course, Hendrik impressed upon the midwives the baby’s inability to take an active part in the process; instead, the work had to be done by the uterus and the abdominal muscles. Birth was brought about by contractions, an innate function of the womb. Hendrik repeatedly told the midwives to summon an obstetrician when complications arose, and to do it in time, not to wait until the baby was dead, ‘which is a mistake made by many midwives, who let the woman groan until all her strength is gone’. Midwives were often ashamed to appeal to a man for help, ‘thinking it would disgrace them and ruin their reputation’. Some stubbornly insisted on handling the delivery themselves, come what may, saying proudly: ‘I have never been at a loss, nor ever had anyone meddling with my work.’ But it was their clients who had to deal with the resulting pain and distress. There were midwives who told frightening stories about the instruments the obstetricians would use if summoned, especially the dreaded speculum matricis, with which women were ‘screwed open’. But Hendrik swore that experienced obstetricians never used that instrument, at most they used a speculum vaginae ‘to widen the vagina, in order to look into it deeper’. Nowadays, he said, it was thought that ‘no instruments should be used as long as one can do without them’. It was now customary to insert only the fingers into a woman’s vagina, Hendrik assured them, but ‘obstetricians and midwives alike daily experience women in labour screaming before they have even been touched’. Hendrik told the midwives to handle women in labour with the greatest of care: ‘Confronting a woman with potential difficulties can be very harmful.’ If complications arose, ‘the assembled friends should be told in all calmness’, but not the woman in labour, ‘because the fright could hamper the delivery’. It was important to warn the family ahead of time, though, because ‘if one does not impress upon them the dangers beforehand, and the woman ends up dying, one can expect nothing but curses’. Many obstetricians refused to perform risky procedures for fear of malicious gossip if things went wrong. Hendrik brought up the notorious case of Lysbeth Jans van Ravenswaaij. Although it had taken place when he was just a toddler, he knew all the particulars of the case, because it had been such a traumatic event in his father’s life. He said that Lysbeth Jans had been swiftly delivered of her baby by the late

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master Andries Boekelman, ‘in the presence of my father, without the least violence being done to her body’. But they had been reviled for their efforts by people who had not even been present. Furthermore, it was known that the patient had been suffering from gangrene prior to the arrival of Boekelman, who had demonstrated this to bystanders before assisting the delivery. After some urging, he had performed the operation, thus jeopardizing his reputation, because he knew that otherwise the woman would die. The case of Lysbeth Jans showed that anyone’s good name could be sullied by the vicious lies of ignorant and resentful people. Hendrik rebuked midwives who avoided helping the destitute by claiming that labour was not far enough advanced and making a hasty exit, ‘whereas they stick to the rich like leeches’. In his lessons Hendrik discussed every conceivable complication. He also touched upon another essential point, namely how to determine whether the unborn baby was alive or not. Because his father had once been painfully mistaken on this score, Hendrik cautioned the midwives ‘never to take this for granted, but to feel the umbilical cord and ascertain whether it is limp and no longing beating’. He also warned them that ‘stinking fingers are not conclusive either, because the filaments and blood often found in the vagina can ferment, giving off a foul odour, and while it is true that such a stench is one of the signs of the child’s death, it must be considered an uncertain sign’. Most dead foetuses remained in the womb without giving off a nasty smell. This was the case as long as the cervix remained closed and no air could get to the foetus. ‘My father, too, says that women carrying a dead foetus have little discomfort’, Hendrik told the midwives. It sometimes happened that a baby died of ‘exhaustion’ during a complicated delivery: ‘If one has observed all the signs of the baby’s death . . . one must undertake, after due consultation, to save the life of the mother.’ In such cases the baby should be extracted quickly: ‘If it is dead, it does not matter so much whether this causes a tear or two in its skin.’ A baby that had been dead for some time could be induced more easily: ‘If the baby is completely decayed, its head comes out easily because everything is soft and malleable, and the bones of the fontanelle simply collapse.’ In the opposite case—when the mother’s life was threatened— surgeons could rarely help, not even by performing a Caesarean section. That was done only to save the child, when the mother was already dead, though usually such attempts to save the child’s life were

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in vain. Hendrik told the midwives: ‘My father has opened up women immediately after death, but never managed to pull a child out alive, because foetuses generally die along with the mother.’ The Placenta In spite of the instruction they received, midwives still clung to all kinds of mistaken notions. One thing that was difficult to eradicate was their belief in ‘suckers’, or the living beasts that women sometimes thought they had in their wombs, though as Hendrik explained, ‘the movement they felt in their belly was usually nothing more than wind, or an unnatural movement of the abdominal muscles’. In 1705 his father had said: ‘If suckers really did exist, I would doubtless have seen one in my thirty-seven years of experience, considering the opportunities afforded me by my association with midwives.’ The midwives had brought all manner of strange things for him to examine: ‘Often they brought me clotted blood that resembled an animal, but never a live sucker.’20 The superstition persisted, even though Ruysch kept a number of so-called suckers in his collection, in order to demonstrate that they were only hardened pieces of placenta that had remained in the uterus for several weeks.21 Both their name—they were called suckers because they were thought to suck up the nourishment intended for the foetus—and the stories about them were ridiculous, in Ruysch’s view, but in 1725 such tall tales were still in lively circulation.22 One point Ruysch continued to hammer home was the necessity of exercising restraint, particularly in removing the afterbirth. He taught the midwives to extract the placenta with great caution: ‘If the placenta is loose, it is not difficult, because then it simply falls into our hands; if not, one should pluck at the umbilical cord without actually pulling on it, tell the patient to push hard and cough repeatedly . . . and if the placenta still fails to come out, help her to her feet.’ In the meantime, the midwife was supposed to stay calm and not betray any signs of worry. Even if the women present merely ‘put their heads together’ to discuss the problem, the mother could become alarmed and that would be counterproductive. Midwives were told simply to wait for

20 21 22

AW (Frederik Ruysch, Alle de Werken) 683. AW 572, 749. AW 1107.

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the after-pains, meanwhile massaging the body with oil and perhaps administering a soothing enema. If all else failed, the usual practice— described in the literature and also taught by Ruysch—was ‘to hold the umbilical cord with one hand, and, using the index finger of the other hand, go into the body alongside the cord and pierce the placenta’, thus facilitating its removal.23 Some placentas, however, were hard and tough and not at all easy to pierce. Moreover, midwives’ hands could go numb during difficult deliveries, and the inability to feel subtle distinctions made such procedures risky. If a midwife, in her haste to remove the placenta, set to work carelessly and damaged the uterus, the consequences could be fatal: ‘The abdomen immediately becomes hard and swells up, inducing a fever that is often quickly followed by death.’ Ruysch lamented such maltreatment: ‘How many sad cases have I experienced in more than fifty years, when lively, healthy, cheerful women who complained of no discomfort’ during an uncomplicated delivery ended up dying anyway, ‘through mishandling of the placenta’. Thinking it better to sit back and let nature take its course, he compared the removal of the placenta with the act of picking pears: ‘When the fruit is ripening and one shakes the tree, the ripe pears fall off first. If one also wants some of the less ripe fruit and shakes the tree more forcefully, more pears will fall off, taking the branches with them. If one had waited a few days longer for them to ripen more, they would have fallen off anyway. And so it is with the placenta: give it some time to ripen, and it will fall right into our hands.’24 This question prompted Frederik Ruysch to comment upon the guidelines set forth in the literature on obstetrics. Both Paul Portal and François Mauriceau had described how to remove the placenta safely, but not what a midwife should do when the placenta was stuck. In Ruysch’s opinion, when the placenta could not be removed without danger to the mother, it was better to leave it in the womb. Though risky, it was the lesser of two evils. In any case, midwives should not tug on the umbilical cord. Ruysch had once been called to a delivery because the midwife, tugging away on the cord, had pulled the entire uterus out through the vagina.25 Ruysch told the midwives how

23 24 25

AW 747. AW 1100–1122. AW 57, 1030, 1033, 1109.

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dangerous this was, because once outside the body, the uterus hardens very quickly and cannot easily be pushed back inside. He pointed out that this could also occur spontaneously as a result of the afterpains, so it was vital that a midwife not leave the mother’s bedside too soon. Most women, of course, were afraid that the placenta would rot inside them, becoming putrid and emitting evil vapours. But Ruysch told them that dead foetuses could remain inside the body for as long as two months without causing problems, so a placenta that did not come out immediately did not necessarily have to create problems either.26 He pointed out that farmers never worried that a cow might die if the afterbirth failed to come out.27 The placenta was part of the child, not of the mother, and therefore one could assume that nature would eventually cause her body to reject the alien object. Ruysch had known placentas to come out after days or even weeks. Normally the placenta did not rot, nor was it a cause of inflammation, fever or foul odours. If the placenta remained in the uterus, it became blistered, or changed into a brown mass, similar to kneaded rye dough, and it was in this guise that it was mistaken for a ‘sucker’. For years Ruysch had been telling all of this to the midwives, but he had to admit that many of them did not take his advice to heart for fear that it would cost them their livelihood. Ruysch could understand this. He knew that midwives, under pressure to show the afterbirth to the assembled company, tended to be impatient. It was generally thought that the new mother should not get up and be brought to her bed before the placenta had been removed.28 Ruysch, however, advised midwives to put the mother to bed immediately, for if she rested, the after-pains would make the placenta come out by itself.29 The midwives objected, saying that the cervix would close if a new mother stood up before the placenta had been expelled. That was not true, Ruysch explained, and told them that it took a number of days for this to happen. His collection included the uterus of a woman who had died two weeks after giving birth. As the midwives could easily see, the uterus was enlarged and the cervix still open.

26 27 28 29

AW 1022. AW 1107. AW 1114. AW 1105.

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Midwives who followed Ruysch’s advice told of the resistance they encountered: ‘Once I’ve delivered the child, I can’t get the placenta out fast enough’, one of them said, since among those present there was always someone who maintained that her midwife could accomplish this better. A midwife who insisted that it was best not to tear the placenta loose was invariably told to do it anyway. The host of people present would begin to shout that the woman in childbed was being murdered. Sometimes they would rail at the midwife and even threaten her, until someone went to fetch another midwife.30 Ruysch realized that such intimidation meant that midwives were inclined to go about their work rather heavy-handedly, and wondered in desperation if such deep-seated beliefs could ever be dispelled.31 In 1719 Ruysch made a discovery that seemed to support his laissez-faire attitude towards labour and delivery. Opening up a woman who had died in childbirth, he found a round muscle at the bottom of the uterus, which he thought was intended to expel the placenta. He published his discovery in 1720. ‘Oh, how miraculously the merciful Creator has provided for this, so that weakened women in labour will not want for anything!’ exclaimed the eighty-one-year-old anatomist.32 His discovery was greeted with scepticism, however, and it was asked why the muscle had not been discovered earlier. The elderly Ruysch explained that the muscle could be observed only in women who had just given birth, and when a woman died in childbirth, her family seldom allowed her body to be dissected. Even when a dissectionist received permission to do so, it was not certain that the next of kin would let him keep the body part. Having found the muscle in a woman who died after the placenta had been forcibly removed, Ruysch was curious to see what damage had been inflicted on the womb. After much beseeching, he was allowed to cut open the woman’s body and remove the uterus. This was a good example of how the relatives of deceased patients could further the dissectionist’s work. ‘I would never have discovered the muscle’, Ruysch declared, ‘if entreaties, money and good words had not resulted in permission to open up that poor woman’s body.’ Ruysch assured his fellow anatomists that he had not published his discovery without due

30 31 32

AW 1029–1031. AW 1103. AW 1029, 1085.

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consideration. Though many remained sceptical, others heaped praise on the man who had managed, despite his advanced age, to make such an important discovery. Outside the Netherlands many people accepted Ruysch’s discovery on the basis of his reputation. He reported proudly that in Germany, for example, it was already called the musculus Ruyschianus.33 Abraham Vater wrote from Wittenberg to say that he considered the discovery so valuable ‘that I know of no other that has come to light in the past century that can be compared to it’. The Amsterdam physician Hermanus Schijn, whom Ruysch had summoned to the bedside of a woman who died after her placenta had been manhandled, wrote a verse in honour of the muscle.34 For those in doubt, Ruysch had a conclusive argument: ‘Would one of the first professors who came to see me about this great discovery have gone away, contented, if he had not been convinced of it?’ Ruysch was referring to Herman Boerhaave, who had been persuaded by his elderly friend and afterwards wrote to him: ‘Dearest Ruysch! A hundred thousand thanks for the edifying presentation I was recently given in your unforgettable theatre . . . Diligence, love of truth, and God’s grace bring mankind so far in exploring Creation! Go on using your lively old age, your expert judgement and your still-keen senses to honour God, to edify mankind, and to satisfy your own curiosity. How glad I am that I saw so clearly that uterine muscle which, I had been told, was visible only to my mind’s eye!’35 Although Boerhaave was obviously convinced, many remained doubtful. Ysbrand Gijsbert Arlebout, municipal physician of Weesp, reported that a midwife had told him that what Ruysch said about the placenta was all very well and good, but she ‘dared not depend on what Ruysch says or writes’. Arlebout had asked her whether she would prefer to remove the placenta in bits and pieces, or to wait a little longer and have it fall into her hands.36 Ruysch went on to publish a special treatise on the uterine muscle ‘for the instruction of the midwives, despite all the slander’. He also published a letter penned by a friend in Paris, Philippe Hecquet,

33

AW 1100–1122. Hermanus Schijn, a teacher in the Remonstrant community, devoted various verses to the work of Ruysch; see AW 720, 758, 759. 35 Scheltema, Leven, 35. 36 AW 1113. 34

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who had written to another colleague to break the news that was taking the scientific world by storm, namely that Ruysch, ‘the Prince of anatomists’, had discovered a muscle in the uterus. It confirmed Hecquet’s own idea that the body had an innate ability to cure itself. We knew Ruysch as an anatomist, Hecquet wrote, ‘but you and later generations hereby learn and will recount that he was also a very wise physician’.37 In the end, however, the discovery was not universally corroborated, and Ruysch was forced to conclude that he had been mistaken. It was Frederik Ruysch’s task, as municipal obstetrician and lecturer in obstetrics, to instruct the midwives and to answer their questions, but he also considered it his duty to ‘examine the bodies of women who had died in childbirth, to discover the cause of the ill-fated birth and the death that followed’.38 To obtain material for examination, he appealed to the midwives to bring him whatever came their way. In the spring of 1719, when he was planning to investigate whether twins had separate placentas, he asked the midwives to bring him the afterbirths of any twins they delivered.39 Rather than throw the placenta in the fire or into a bucket of hot ash, as was the custom, he believed that it would be better to let him examine it.40 The Shaft Ruysch not only examined the female reproductive organs, but also undertook a detailed study of the male genitalia. His research into the structure of the scrotum was famous, because it had provoked a quarrel with Johann Rau, but he also took an ardent interest in the ‘shaft’, or male member. Indeed, Ruysch believed that ‘no place else in the body are God’s works as remarkable as in this part’. There was also credit to be gained by its study, for the glans, in particular, was difficult to examine. Even Reinier de Graaf, who had published a celebrated treatise on the subject, had not managed to discover the exact structure of the penis. De Graaf had been a very capable dissectionist, 37 AW 1141–1148. Philippe Hecquet, Remarques sur l’abus des purgatifs et des amers, avec deux lettres, l’une sur la génération des insectes & l’autre sur le muscle uterin, découvert par Mr. Ruysch (Paris, 1729). 38 AW 1029. 39 AW 1037. 40 AW 1118.

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and Ruysch did not hold this failure against him. ‘To be sure, the dissecting knife is not enough’, he said, and in this case even the syringe was of limited use. Reinier de Graaf ’s research had been based mainly on the results that could be obtained by injection. ‘This instrument is very useful in making the shaft in a dead torso stand up’, De Graaf had been pleased to discover at the time. When he injected fluid into the lower abdominal artery, ‘the shaft immediately became stiff ’.41 But Ruysch had observed that a different working method was required for the study of the glans: ‘The syringe is used to fill the blood vessels, but it is of almost no use in this matter.’42 Even so, as was usual in Ruysch’s work, arterial injection did, in fact, occasion his discovery. After removing the blood from a penis and injecting the blood vessels, he had sliced up the glans and observed that it was filled with the waxy substance he had injected. The glans was not, therefore, a fleshy mass, as had been assumed. Ruysch then launched a series of experiments. Taking another penis, he pressed the blood out of the vessels and flushed them out with water, then filled the thickest, spongy part with air and tied it off, in the hope that when it had dried the ‘true nature of this head’ would become clear. But his efforts were in vain, for only the inner part became visible; it had hardened, but the outer part had remained soft. He then took a blowpipe and stuck it in the part containing the urinary canal. When he blew into the pipe, the glans finally swelled, but the internal part did not. This second experiment was followed by a third, in which he used copper blowpipes to inflate both parts. He then tied off the whole penis and dried it. Just how difficult it was to keep the air from escaping would be experienced by those who tried to repeat the procedure, he warned. When the specimen had dried, Ruysch sliced up the penis and the glans and observed that the glans was merely a continuation of the penis, and that the two elements were actually a single entity. Ruysch preserved the foremost part of a penis in a bottle, having ‘cut off the crown on the shaft behind the red head for the sake of decency’.43 He also preserved the penis and scrotum of a little boy. When the scrotum was inflated, the penis became erect. Ruysch had

41 42 43

De Graaf, Alle de wercken, 668. AW 136–139. AW 842.

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discovered that this was because a subcutaneous cellular membrane in the scrotum was connected to that of the entire penis. (Beneath the skin, Ruysch explained, there was a thick nerve-like sheath that was very strong, ‘so that in the case of a huge erection, the shaft will not become too thick and unwieldy’, and below that thick sheath was yet another cellular membrane.) Now Ruysch knew why soldiers killed in battle and found lying on their backs often had an erection. A former soldier had once asked Ruysch for an explanation of this phenomenon. At the time Ruysch had not known the answer, but afterwards he had observed the same thing in the body of a man who had been stabbed to death. The man’s body had already begun to decompose when Ruysch found ‘the shaft erect’. So this was the explanation: the fluids in the cellular membrane had fermented, causing the whole member to swell.44 A preserved penis was a precious possession, not least because of the difficulty involved in its preparation. Ruysch had once worked extremely hard and with ‘great meticulousness’ to preserve a human penis, and the ‘successful outcome’ was a preparation that showed the penis more clearly and distinctly than he had ever seen it before. He was so happy with the result that he placed this splendid specimen on a pedestal and showed it with pride to visitors, until the day he discovered that someone had snatched it from its base and made off with it.45 Ruysch’s knowledge of anatomy, gynaecology and obstetrics meant that he was frequently called upon to give his expert opinion, not just during complicated deliveries but also in cases of venereal disease and other genital disorders. He had sometimes been summoned to examine a woman with a ‘monstrosity’ hanging out of her vagina. On those occasions, he had seen that it was her uterus and had put it back in place. Both his research and his medical practice had taught him a great deal about venereal disease. He warned midwives that if they delivered the baby of a ‘pox-fouled’ woman, they could become infected themselves, and would then be in danger of passing on the disease through their contaminated hands. Many thought this impossible, but Ruysch had once treated a seventy-year-old midwife, who had become infected this way. He and Pieter Adriaansz had cured her with a ‘slaver

44 45

AW 841. AW 1015–1016. See also AW 573, 621, 885.

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Fig. 41 Depiction of a penis from Hondert anatomische en chirurgicaale aanmerkingen (One hundred anatomical and surgical observations), 1690. The object is ‘a man’s shaft, inflated, dried and cut in two longitudinally’. The a’s mark the artery that runs through the ‘sinewy, spongy’ part. The outer tip of the head (B) is not inflated, ‘which is why it lost all its sponginess during the drying process’. The b’s mark the inflated internal part of the head, which is, in fact, a continuation of the large, thick, spongy body.

cure’, which entailed daubing the sores with a mercury-based salve that made the patient salivate.46 It was not known exactly how mercury worked, but experience had shown that it could combat sores. Treatment with mercury was called a ‘slaver cure’ because it produced symptoms of poisoning. It was a kill-or-cure remedy with horrible side effects, and it was not even guaranteed to work. Ruysch urged those who attempted this last-ditch treatment to exercise extreme caution. In the course of his research Ruysch had discovered that a gonorrhoea sufferer’s penis thickens because the cells in the subcutaneous membrane fill up with the vapours from foul-smelling pus. In his view, a man with gonorrhoea could find relief by ‘holding the shaft in cold water for an hour, which often causes it to shrink.47 Ruysch explained to his fellow physicians that the pain felt by patients with gonorrhoea was localized in the papillae on the glans.

46 Amsterdam University Library, MS XXI C 18. Hendrik Ruysch’s notes in Portal, Practijk, 69. 47 AW 421–425.

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During coitus they produced a pleasant sensation, but when covered with sores they were the source of intense pain. Ruysch, who likened the papillae to nipples, realized that the reason they had not yet been described in the anatomical literature was because they were evident only in ‘someone in the act of love-making, or with a hard shaft’.48 Ruysch had discovered that in order to see the papillae clearly, the penis had to be ‘soaked in water only, and then inflated, tied off, and put in the sun to dry’. One could then see the ‘nipples’ not only with a magnifying glass, but even with the naked eye. Ruysch encountered nipples similar to those found on the penis in other sensitive places as well: the cervix, for instance, where there were countless numbers of them, ‘which makes this area very sensitive’. He also observed large numbers of them in the ‘folds of the vagina’, and compared them to the papillae on the nipples of female breasts.49 Just as these produced ‘pleasure in suckling’, so the nipples on the glans ensured ‘a pleasurable sensation during fleshly union’. Not everyone agreed with Ruysch. The Italian anatomist Morgagni, for example, thought that glands must be involved, but Ruysch was adamant, maintaining that they were nipples which, ‘when they become taut during love-making, and are rubbed gently, produce the greatest pleasure’.50 Ruysch preserved the nipple of a female breast with its accompanying ‘round ring’, which he had examined. Even though that ring was usually brownish, he had found that the skin beneath it was white. Here the papillae were visible, and in Ruysch’s opinion they bore an unmistakable resemblance to the papillae on the ‘head of the shaft’.51 By way of comparison, Ruysch displayed in his museum the nipple of a woman next to the nipple of a whale.52 One could see that the woman’s nipple was perforated with little holes: these were the openings of the milk ducts, which, according to Ruysch, ‘swell unduly during pregnancy, and when women are breastfeeding’.53 At a public anatomy lesson he demonstrated that the rest of the breast was not glandular, but consisted of fatty tissue and a tough white substance, which most

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AW 621–622. AW 604. AW 945. AW 830. AW 508. AW 606.

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nearly resembled the substance he had encountered in the epididymis (the tube-shaped sac attached to the back of the testicles).54 Ruysch had thus succeeded in tracing the source of the pleasurable feelings experienced during sexual intercourse, but one vital question had been left unanswered: how were sperm produced? Robert Erskine, chief personal physician to the tsar, had once discussed this with Ruysch, asking him if he denied that sperm were to be found in the blood vessels, mixed with other fluids, and were separated from those fluids in the testicles. Ruysch replied that he did not claim to know the exact composition of blood, but he knew that it did not produce sperm.55 Reinier de Graaf had shown that the testicles consisted not of a spongy or glandular material, but of blood vessels. Ruysch, who had studied those vessels, thought that the ends of the arteries changed into ‘sperm vessels’, in which the ‘rudiments’ of sperm were ‘changed into another substance’. He elaborated on this theory: ‘In the middle of the testicle one can see various open mouths, which I regard as gates, through which the semen, having been produced in the testicles, is conveyed to the epididymis.’56 Thus there were various discussions and debates, among them the question of whether the hymen, or virginal membrane, really existed. Ruysch had observed that it did, and as proof he preserved a vagina with an intact hymen, which he described in his third thesaurus.57 The most important discussion with respect to reproduction, however, concerned the origin and development of the embryo. The Development of the Embryo In his capacity as municipal obstetrician, Frederik Ruysch regularly put in an appearance, usually together with his son, at complicated deliveries and miscarriages. Not only did he make a diagnosis and talk the surgeons through their surgical procedures, but in the case of miscarriages he sometimes provided an unusual form of post-natal care. Parents were often upset by the sight of what they took to be a deformed child, since a foetus that had been dead in the uterus for

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AW 890. AW 1058, 1133–1134. AW 604. See also AW 423, 594, 604, 605, 614, 762, 883, 885. AW 575.

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some time had limp limbs and a caved-in torso and head. Ruysch consoled the distraught parents by telling them that their baby had, in fact, been well-formed, and to show them what the child had looked like at the time of its death, he inflated some of its blood vessels and restored it to its original shape. The head again became round, and the child ‘completely lost that ugly image of a misshapen monstrosity’. The caved-in belly swelled up and the child looked as though it had some meat on its bones. The parents were delighted by such metamorphoses, and never failed to express their gratitude to Ruysch, who believed that such consolation also worked as a means of prevention, because if a couple kept thinking of deformities during intercourse, it was possible that these negative thoughts would cause them to produce a deformed child.58 Misshapen ‘monsters’ had for centuries been a source of fascination, and there was much speculation as to what caused them. The same was true of miscarriages. It was generally thought that a miscarriage was the result of an abrupt movement, such as a fall, or of a surge of emotion, particularly sudden and intense terror. Ruysch tended to subscribe to this opinion: ‘Daily experience shows that a sudden shock is more dangerous and its consequences more serious for a woman than a man.’59 The question was whether such violent emotions could also give rise to deformities. Among the seventeenth-century physicians who were convinced that they could were Claas Tulp and Job van Meekeren, as well as Steven Blankaart, who in the 1680s had described the case of a woman who had given birth to a child with scales after she had washed some sheets in a river. Frederik Ruysch was sceptical. In his younger years, when confronted with a baby born without a bladder, he had declined to speculate as to the cause, only reporting that the mother had fallen several weeks before giving birth. However, doubting whether that could be the cause of the child’s deformity, he made a note: ‘Could such a thing be caused by fright?’60 Later on, after becoming an expert on embryonic growth, Ruysch was even more sceptical about the ability of the emotions to exert an influence on the foetus, especially during the last stages of pregnancy.

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AW 1022–1023. AW 1063. AW 68.

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Since his early days in The Hague, Ruysch had been collecting embryos in all stages of growth, in his search for answers to the questions of reproduction and embryonic development. When he moved to Amsterdam, he met the eccentric dissectionist Dirk Kerckrink, who had studied in Leiden with DeleBoë and was pondering the same questions as Ruysch. Although Ruysch contributed to Kerckrink’s publications, he did not think his methods sound. Kerckrink had claimed to be able to distinguish limbs in a three-day embryo, and since then a number of other anatomists had depicted tiny embryos, complete with fingers and toes, in a curled-up position as though they were fourmonth foetuses. There were even people who maintained that ‘they could see in a woman’s egg a small creature with arms, legs and a head’. Ruysch preserved a number of embryos as tiny as a grain of rice and one no bigger than a louse.61 In the beginning an embryo was simply a formless white lump, even when seen under Mr Leeuwenhoek’s lenses, declared Ruysch. In fact, as he was fond of telling visitors, it most nearly resembled a morsel of soft white cheese.62 Such specks of humanity had dissolved between his fingers on numerous occasions, so he had begun to put them in a fluid that hardened them immediately, enabling him to ‘preserve them forever without any changes’. Ruysch kept an embryo the size of an aniseed, unfortunately severed from the placenta at the request of the parents. But he stressed that he had opened it up very carefully with his own two hands, and could therefore say for certain that in no way did it resemble a human being. Only in somewhat larger embryos could one discern rudimentary limbs. Visitors to his museum could follow the complete developmental cycle: ‘It is easy to observe how, over time, the immature being changes in form daily.’ One could see that ‘in the primary stages no limbs are apparent . . . afterwards, in places where the shoulders and thighs will appear, only small bumps protrude’.63 In fact, during the early stages of embryonic growth, far less was visible than some people claimed. Ruysch maintained that the sex of the foetus could be discerned only after six months. He had seen a miscarried female foetus of three or four months with a clitoris which stuck out so far that the child appeared to be male: ‘Therefore I seldom

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AW 668. AW 688. Schreiber, Leven, 69.

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advise parents to record this specifically in their books.’64 (It was customary to register in a Bible or some other book the births, marriages and deaths of family members. Some people also recorded miscarriages.) Ruysch had witnessed more than one delivery at which all the women present had taken the miscarried foetus to be male, but he had shown it to be female, explaining that in later months the labia ‘grow and protrude to such an extent that the head of the clitoris is almost completely hidden from view’.65 Research was difficult: determining the age of a tiny embryo, for example, was always problematic. ‘There is no one who can say for sure the exact age of such tiny creatures, when they are put into our hands, considering that some of them increase in size very slowly and others very quickly, and it is always difficult to learn this with certainty from the mother’, said Ruysch. One would have to know the precise date of conception, ‘but decency does not allow us to investigate this closely’.66 At times the preparation of such minuscule specimens went awry: Ruysch had an embryo half a thumb in length, whose head he had accidentally cut off when opening up the placental membranes.67 On the other hand, some preparations were very successful indeed. The ‘royal cabinet’ contained an embryo the size of a thumb, about which Ruysch had remarked: ‘I can truthfully say that I have never had or seen a more beautiful or delicate object of this type.’68 Ruysch kept a fully developed embryo one finger in length, which still lay in its amniotic fluid, just as it had lain in the uterus, in a white membrane as thin as a cobweb. Because such things were almost beyond human comprehension, Ruysch was not surprised when a rival who constantly criticized his work pronounced it an impossibility. He did not even hold it against his detractor for accusing him of having replaced the original fluid with another, because if he had not prepared the specimen himself, he would not have thought it possible either.69 With regard to another finger-length embryo, Ruysch said that the parents should not regret that it did not grow to maturity, because it

64 65 66 67 68 69

AW 692. See also AW 209, 837. AW 838. AW 609. AW 701. AW 828. AW 851.

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Fig. 42 Depiction by Cornelis Huijberts of very small skeletons, from Het zesde anatomische cabinet. Fig. 1 represents a skeleton the size of a little finger, holding in its right hand an unfertilized egg (A) and in its left hand three hairs to which three unfertilized eggs are attached (B). Fig. 2 depicts a slightly larger skeleton, holding in its right hand a hair from which dangles an unopened fertilized egg. Fig. 3 represents a skeleton the size of an index finger, holding in its left hand a hair, to which a fertilized egg is attached. Ruysch cut this egg open but could detect nothing inside it. Figs. 4 and 5 show the beginnings of a placenta.

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would have been born with a cleft palate and a hare-lip.70 He asked his fellow anatomists to consider how likely it was that such defects were the result of a shock experienced by the mother during pregnancy: in his view, the presence of disorders in very tiny embryos pointed to some innate dysfunction rather than external causes such as fright. The Mystery of Reproduction A much more fundamental question than the cause of deformities in children was the centuries-old debate on reproduction. Hippocrates had imagined that both men and women produced seminal fluids, which flowed via the spinal marrow and the kidney to the genitals. After sexual intercourse, the two fluids mingled in the uterus, giving rise to an embryo. Whether the child was male or female or displayed the characteristics of the father or the mother depended on whose seminal fluid was the strongest. According to Aristotle, women did not produce semen. They contributed only unformed matter, to which the male sperm added the individual form. The sperm thus possessed the vital force that gave rise to new life, which was apparently nourished by the woman’s menstrual blood. On the basis of Aristotle’s authority, this notion, which had a very long tradition, remained the generally accepted one: the man’s semen contained the germ of the new individual, which was ‘incubated’ by the woman. That was not true, however, of such animals as mice, frogs, moths and snails, which, it was thought, had no sperm, but were generated spontaneously from rubbish, excrement and mud. Galen had combined both notions, distinguishing two kinds of seed: the male, which contributed life and form, and the female, which provided nourishment. He saw an analogy between male and female sexual organs, and viewed the ovaries as the female version of the testicles. In his view, the woman’s seed started in the female testes and made its way down oviducts to the uterus, just as in men the sperm travelled from the testes through the spermaduct, or vas deferens. The unlikelihood that this theory provided the full explanation was not pointed out until the mid-sixteenth century by the Italian anatomist

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AW 691.

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Gabriele Falloppio, who in 1561 described how the oviduct springs from the uterus. He demonstrated that the ducts widen into trumpet-shaped openings at their ends, where they lie opposite the ovary, open towards the abdominal cavity. Since that time these ducts have been called the Fallopian tubes, but what exactly took place there long remained a mystery. One of the many scientists to study the enigma of reproduction was William Harvey, the discoverer of the circulatory system. After his appointment as personal physician to the King of England, Harvey had withdrawn during the English Civil War to Oxford, where he carried out research into embryonic growth in hens’ eggs and in mammals (particularly deer from the royal game reserve). He published his results in 1651, at the age of seventy-three, in De generatione animalium. In contrast to the prevailing view, Harvey claimed that humans come from eggs. Indeed, he had concluded that all animals come from eggs, except for insects, which were thought to spring spontaneously from waste matter—an Aristotelian idea that Harvey adhered to in another respect by maintaining that the embryo’s development depended on the vital force present in the male sperm. Aristotle’s theory of the spontaneous generation of insects and other ‘bloodless animals’ was rendered less plausible by the research carried out by Francesco Redi, a physician active at the Tuscan court, who demonstrated that flies lay eggs in meat scraps. Observing that worms appeared in rotting meat infested with flies but not in meat protected from them, he drew the conclusion that insects did not spring from rotting organic waste, but came from eggs that the female had laid to provide them with a ready source of nourishment. The theory that the embryo originated in an egg was brought even closer to general acceptance by Jan Swammerdam, whose research into the development of insects had disproved the view that insect organs metamorphosed from waste matter. Growth in all animals, he said, took place by means of epigenesis, meaning that development occurred through the successive differentiation of an unstructured egg, rather than the growth of a preformed entity. Swammerdam was convinced that the study of simple creatures would provide knowledge of more complex animals. He found ‘the propagation of these little creatures so clear that by this means we can proceed to the true basis of the procreation of other animals’. The idea that all animal life originates in eggs found increasing acceptance, but Harvey’s other ideas, which he had derived from Aristotle,

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met with growing criticism, especially in Amsterdam and Leiden. Ruysch’s teacher Frans DeleBoë, for example, ridiculed the idea that only the man produced the seed of human growth. What he thought much more likely was Hippocrates’ idea that both the man and the woman produced seeds that mingled in the uterus and together gave rise to the foetus. Adhering as he did to the biological ideas of Aristotle, Harvey had done no research on the ovaries and Fallopian tubes. He regarded the ovaries (the female testes) as rudimentary organs, such as nipples in men. In 1657 the Dordrecht physician Willem Langley, who had studied the development of the chicken from an egg and also impregnation in rabbits, concluded that the testes muliebres contained eggs. In Leiden intensive research was carried out on the reproductive organs, on the assumption that they would provide the key to the mystery. At that time, students of DeleBoë and Van Horne—Niels Stensen, Jan Swammerdam, Reinier de Graaf and also Frederik Ruysch—were diligently investigating the sexual organs.71 Niels Stensen found that the female organs were not comparable to the male organs, because, like the ovaries of egg-laying animals, this was where the eggs were formed. In 1667 Stensen introduced three new terms to the study of human anatomy: ovum, ovarium (a term already used for egg-laying animals) and the tubae named after Gabriele Falloppio. But Stensen’s standpoint was not accepted until Reinier de Graaf published his writings on the subject in 1668. Reinier de Graaf described with great exactitude the internal and external sexual organs of the human female. Comparing humans and animals, he, too, saw similarities between the ‘female testes’ and the ovaries of egg-laying animals. In the ovaries he also observed the small vesicles, or sacs, detected earlier but considered inessential. According to De Graaf, however, they were absolutely vital, because they contained the germ which, after impregnation, developed into an individual. He called the vesicles eggs. The function of the ‘female testes’ was now clear: they were egg nests. Next, De Graaf attempted to determine exactly which changes occurred in an ovary after impregnation. Experimenting on rabbits, he examined them at various times after ‘play’ and concluded that

71 See Jan Swammerdam to Henry Oldenburg, Amsterdam, 12 April 1673 (Corr. Oldenburg IX, 584).

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insemination took place in the ovary and the fertilized egg then made its way to the uterus. The question now was how fertilization came about. De Graaf believed that the sperm could reach the uterus and perhaps even the Fallopian tubes, but he did not think they could penetrate as far as the ovary. He therefore assumed (in line with Harvey) that sperm emitted a kind of vapour that travelled via the uterus and the tubae to the ovaries, and that this ‘seminal spirit’ triggered some kind of fermentation in the eggs. As with Aristotle, the existence of such a ‘spirit’ could not be demonstrated, but it was sometimes suggested that the curious fatigue experienced by males after coitus might indicate that the ‘seminal spirit’ had left their bodies. The notion that eggs were fertilized by a vapour—an ‘aura’ or a ‘fluidum’—in the male sperm was soon undermined when Anthony van Leeuwenhoek discovered small motile creatures in human semen. The Leiden professor Theodoor Craanen, who took a great interest in Van Leeuwenhoek’s observations, introduced him to one of his relatives, a student named Johan Ham. When Ham paid a second visit to Van Leeuwenhoek, in August 1677, he took along the semen of a man with gonorrhoea, in which he had seen moving creatures with tails and assumed that they had something to do with the man’s disease. He asked Van Leeuwenhoek to examine the semen under a microscope. Several years earlier, when Van Leeuwenhoek was examining saliva, perspiration and semen at the request of Henry Oldenburg, secretary of the Royal Society, he had discovered little globules in sperm, but had discontinued his investigations because he found the whole business distasteful. Now he was encouraged to continue his research, but he still felt uneasy about it, since he was using his own semen. To pre-empt accusations of sinful behaviour, he explained that his observations were made with semen recovered from sexual contact with his wife. (Van Leeuwenhoek reported elsewhere that he had put the semen under the microscope within six seconds of ejaculation.) It had emerged from his research that the creatures detected by Johan Ham also occurred in fresh, healthy semen. They were named spermatozoa. Nehemiah Grew, who had succeeded Oldenburg as secretary of the Royal Society, submitted to Van Leeuwenhoek the problem that had arisen from his discovery. Because Harvey and De Graaf had found no sperm in the Fallopian tubes, they had concluded that semen was merely the vehicle for the ‘spirit’ that brought about conception, but their theory could not logically be reconciled with Van Leeuwenhoek’s

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latest discovery. Van Leeuwenhoek went on to observe that spermatozoa did, in fact, reach the Fallopian tubes. In his view, no sperm had been found in the tubes because they could not survive without the woman’s nourishment. He examined the sperm of various animals before advancing his theory of reproduction ex animalculo. Maintaining that a human being originated ‘not from an egg, but from a little creature present in the male sperm’, he launched the idea that the future individual was already contained in the spermatozoon, which he took to be the germ cell that grew in the female body into a new human being. In his opinion, female eggs only contained the nourishment for the male seed. The egg, therefore, was no more than a nest. Both theories had their weak points, and for the time being, the process of reproduction remained a mystery. Of course the problem also intrigued Frederik Ruysch, who held Harvey in high regard, calling him ‘the greatest among the true philosophers . . . the light of the learned world’. Ruysch had experienced at close quarters the evolution of the theories of Reinier de Graaf and Jan Swammerdam. Sometimes Ruysch doubted whether all animals came from eggs: when he dissected a body and discovered worms where they were not normally found, he wondered how worm eggs could possibly end up there.72 To gain an impression of the reproductive process and embryonic formation, Ruysch collected as much material as possible. A rare opportunity presented itself when he was given the uterus of a woman who had been menstruating at the time of her death. Thinking it a worthwhile specimen, he embalmed the uterus and everything attached to it, including the menstrual blood and the proof of eggs in the ovaries.73 Ruysch also kept (in a preservative fluid) the uterus of a woman who had become pregnant shortly before her death. The uterus was slightly enlarged, its substance thickened and its innermost surface velvety in texture. Ruysch had ascertained that one of the eggs in the ovary, the fertilized egg, was larger than the others. When he opened up this egg, he saw that its liquid contents—now ashen in colour—seemed to have ‘coagulated’. He opened the other eggs as well, but their liquid flowed out, so he preserved them in their empty state.74

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His collection also featured a fertilized egg that had been in the uterus for several days. Preserved unopened in liquid, it still contained its original fluid, in which he thought he could detect (in bright sunlight) ‘a round body the size of a small pin-head’. The accompanying text, a quote from Harvey, read: ‘Everything emanates from an egg.’75 Ruysch did not believe that fertilization could take place merely through the dispersion of fleeting vapours from the male sperm, and he knew that ‘during insemination most of the semen flows away, but I am certain that the thick semen remaining in the uterus is enough to bring about fertilization’. He had occasionally found the uterine cavity and the two Fallopian tubes filled with a great deal of sperm. That was extremely unusual. To his regret, Harvey had never found sperm in the wombs of his laboratory animals, but Ruysch succeeded in observing this in humans by taking advantage of a unique opportunity, which presented itself when he was asked to write up a report about a grisly crime. The victim appeared to be a whore who had been beheaded by the young man with whom she had just had intercourse. After recording the obvious cause of death, Ruysch satisfied his scientific curiosity in the presence of three other physicians, who were serving as spectators and witnesses. Ruysch—in his words ‘very curious to see what would emerge from the uterus and the parts connected with conception’—cut open the woman’s abdomen. The cervix was closed, but when Ruysch touched it gently with his finger, it opened up and released some semen. Ruysch then took great care in opening the uterus, where he found more semen, and both tubae were full of it as well. He removed the uterus and Fallopian tubes and put them in a ‘balsam-like fluid’, which caused the semen to harden and remain in situ, to serve as evidence. Later on, another such opportunity came his way, this time involving the body of a woman whose husband had caught her with her lover and stabbed her to death. Ruysch was called upon to open up the body, and when he found the uterus slightly more ‘elevated’ than usual, he suspected that the woman had just become pregnant. He cut the uterus out of the body and took it home for closer inspection, whereupon he found her lover’s semen in the uterine cavity and in both Fallopian tubes.76

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AW 209. AW 668, 680, 938–939.

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Ruysch assumed that if sperm were unnecessary for fertilization, the Fallopian tubes would not have been filled with semen. He had frequently questioned women about this, and most of them had said that when they had become pregnant they generally had the idea that the semen had stayed inside them. Ruysch asked himself: ‘What is one supposed to think of this, except that the substance of nature, and not just its vapours or spirits, is required to do this job?’ There were also women who said they had become pregnant even though the sperm had not stayed inside them, but Ruysch thought it ‘very obvious that they had retained at least enough to bring about conception’. Declining to commit himself as to whether sperm contained little creatures that played a part in impregnation, he merely concluded that ‘the sperm’s vapours or spirits are not enough to bring about insemination: the substance itself must enter the womb’. Ruysch cautiously inferred ‘that in a fecund conception the thicker semen is received into the uterus and the Fallopian tubes, and does not come there only in the form of dispersing spirits’. That seemed plausible, but now the big question was how insemination could take place in the ovary—the place where it all happened, according to the material collected thus far. Ruysch, too, subscribed to the idea that the egg was fertilized in the ovary, and that fertilization enabled it to leave the ovary and travel through the Fallopian tube to the uterine cavity: ‘Whether this action causes the fertilized egg to be pressed out of the ovary in its entirety’, or only the innermost part of it, ‘is a question I’ve been pondering for a long time’. He had decided that in all likelihood it was only the yolk, or inside of the egg, which made its way down to the uterus. It had also occurred to him that in the case of fertilized hens’ eggs, the outermost layer, which was firmly attached to the ovary, did not follow the yolk, but remained—a cupshaped remnant—attached to the ovary. His examinations of deceased women had shown that in humans a kind of shell also stayed behind in the ovary, just as in chickens. To be sure, it was more obvious in birds than in humans, where it was more of a thick membrane. In the uterus, however, nothing was found after insemination that resembled such eggshells, so it seemed that in human females, too, only the yolk of the egg left the ovary. The yolk consisted of the fluid with which the egg was filled, along with ‘the very delicate membranes immediately surrounding this fluid’, Ruysch stated precisely. When a woman became pregnant, the ovary

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gave birth to an egg, as it were, as evidenced by the bottom of the shell that remained in the ovary, for immediately after insemination, it became completely red and ‘its inner surface velvety and rough’, a condition that could be observed when the inner surface of a woman’s uterus was examined shortly after giving birth.77 Ruysch studied everything in minute detail, but there was still a crucial gap in his knowledge, and to fill it, he needed to know how fertilization took place in the ovaries. It was a matter of conjecture, he stressed, but he was inclined to think that ‘every egg on the surface of the ovary has been endowed with an opening of its own’, so that ‘the fertile male sperm can enter and penetrate to the innermost part of the egg, fertilizing it and thus prompting its departure from the ovary’. This mystery was the subject of much speculation, of course. How could the sperm travel the long, winding path to the ovaries? The German anatomist Martin Naboth suggested that certain vesicles he had encountered in the neck of the womb were actually the ‘egg nest’. Ruysch explored this possibility, and came to the conclusion that Naboth’s ‘egg nest’ was probably just a collection of blisters, as previously described by Morgagni. Ruysch took another look, but could discover nothing in the uterus that resembled an egg nest.78 Johann Friedrich Schreiber, Ruysch’s biographer, suggested another solution, namely that the egg—spurred by an amorous encounter to detach itself from the ovary—actually travelled down the Fallopian tube to meet the sperm. But no evidence could be found to support this theory either, and it would be another century before the pieces of the puzzle fell into place.79

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AW 1066–1068. AW 939, 973–974. 79 Only in 1827 did Karl Ernst von Baer succeed in discovering, with the aid of a microscope, the ovum in the follicle (De ovi mammalium et hominis genesi, Leipzig, 1827). What De Graaf had taken to be eggs were merely the capsulae of the eggs. The cell theory dates from 1838. In 1875 Oscar Hertwig observed the fusion of the nuclei of both ovum and spermatozoon. In 1883 it was ascertained that the two nuclei in the fertilized egg each contain half of the total number of chromosomes. In 1903 it was demonstrated that the genes in the chromosomes are the carriers of hereditary characteristics. 78

CHAPTER NINE

LATTER DAYS The sale of Frederik Ruysch’s collection to the tsar was the crowning glory of his career. Not only did it firmly establish his reputation and preserve his work for posterity, but it also made him a wealthy man. He had every reason to take things more calmly, and realized that at his age it was only fitting to contemplate death and to put one’s worldly affairs in order: ‘Would it not be better for a man of eighty-three to keep silent, and to ready himself for that great, soonto-be-undertaken journey? Yes, of course! For one ought, between the various stages of life and that final day, to spend some idle days pondering true philosophy, which is a reflection of death. Indeed, I do so . . . nevertheless, for as long as I live, I shall be diligently engaged day and night in contemplating and discovering the secrets of the human body, and I think that by learning something new every day, I shall grow old happily.’ And what he was still discovering, he published—to the glory of God and the benefit of medicine. He wistfully recalled his youth: he could no longer do what he had done then, because no spectacles could remedy his failing eyesight. On the other hand, he was still eminently capable of making blood vessels visible: ‘It was not so very long ago that I learned how to do this, but now I do it with such confidence that it is truly extraordinary.’1 Looking back on his career, he could only be grateful for the blessings God had bestowed on him since his birth, because, as Ruysch said, ‘in everything I did I felt the merciful hand of the Lord’.2 Approaching Death Death had spared Frederik Ruysch so far, but other members of his family were not so fortunate. In September 1718, not long after his collection had arrived in St Petersburg, his daughter Lucretia died after

1 2

AW (Frederik Ruysch, Alle de Werken) 994, 1004–1105. AW 1093.

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giving birth to a son.3 Two months later his fifteen-year-old granddaughter Rachel Pool died. Shortly before this, Amsterdam had seen 255 deaths in a single week, an alarmingly high number that prompted the burgomasters to ask the Collegium Medicum for advice. Speaking on behalf of the physicians, the Collegium announced that no infectious disease could be identified as the cause of the deaths, but Frederik Ruysch nevertheless thought it time to draw up his last will and testament. At 8 p.m. on Friday, 28 October, he and his wife, Maria Post, had their will drawn up by the notary Jan Schrick.4 They stipulated that after their death their estate should be divided among the surviving five children and the children of their two deceased daughters. The surviving spouse would retain the right of temporary possession and administer the estate, while undertaking to support Elisabeth, the only daughter still at home. They bequeathed to Elisabeth the string of pearls, worth approximately 300 guilders, which belonged to her mother. The portion reserved for the children of the deceased daughters was to be used for their ‘education and upbringing’. The Ruysches named the oldest sons-in-law, Jurriaan Pool and Isaac Hellenbroek, as executors of the estate. Their duties were further specified in a codicil drawn up four months later, which, as was customary, authorized the executors to arrange things in the house of mourning, ‘in particular, to ensure proper burial of the body of the surviving spouse’. They were also authorized to sell the household effects, including ‘the cabinets of rarities’. It had been only a year and a half since Ruysch had sold his rarities, but he had immediately started work on a new collection. Johann Gottlieb Deichsel—a professor of rhetoric at Breslau, who visited Amsterdam in the summer of 1718—had seen in Ruysch’s house four display cabinets full of specimens.5 As far as those cabinets of preparations and other rarities were concerned, the will stipulated that they could be sold ‘in their entirety or as individual pieces or groups’. Finally the will stated that the money Frederik Ruysch and Maria Post had lent to their children and sons-in-law should be deducted from

3 She had named this son Ruysch, which had also been used as a Christian name in the past: Frederik Ruysch’s great-grandfather, who had been pensionary of Amsterdam, was called Ruysch Claasz. 4 Amsterdam City Archives, notarial archive 5655, notary Jan Schrick, 28 October 1718, 14 February 1719. 5 Bergvelt, Wereld onder handbereik.

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their legal share of the inheritance. Reference was made in this regard to the account books, in which everything was recorded. Maria Post signed the will ‘Maria Ruysch’, but because women were required to sign legal documents with their maiden name, she crossed out Ruysch and replaced it with Post. She died a year and a half later, on 18 April 1720, and was buried on 24 April in the Westerkerk. Frederik Ruysch, now eighty-two years old, continued to live on the Bloemgracht with their youngest daughter, thirty-five-year-old Elisabeth, who—according to Johann Friedrich Schreiber, Ruysch’s biographer—was a great comfort to her father, continuing until his death to be ‘a steadfast and industrious companion in all his anatomical work’. Schreiber reported that Elisabeth excelled ‘in knowledge of all parts of the human body’ and was well-versed in ‘her father’s arts’, both botanical and anatomical. Late Work In 1718 the elderly Ruysch stayed for a time with Herman Boerhaave in Leiden. Shortly before Christmas, Boerhaave wrote to the Italian anatomist Morgagni that the copies of Adversaria he had sent had arrived during Ruysch’s visit. With great admiration and pleasure they had studied the work together, and both men assured Morgagni of their feelings of friendship. At Morgagni’s request, Boerhaave had also given a copy to Johann Rau, but he now informed Morgagni that Rau was not at all well, either physically or mentally. Indeed, he had been unable to fulfil his teaching duties the entire winter. Since 1713, Rau had been a professor in Leiden, where he had succeeded Govert Bidloo, who in his last years had been ‘slothful and totally incapable of practising his profession, because of his depraved habits’.6 Rau was only fifty, but he was ailing: having injured his right foot in a fall, he subsequently succumbed to ‘melancholy’. He complained of dizziness and a roaring in his head, and could no longer stand the crowing of cocks or the chiming of bells. Boerhaave, who expected that his successor would soon be named, wanted Morgagni to come to Leiden. He told the Italian that Ruysch, even though he was an old man in his eighties, was longing to discuss anatomy with him. 6 This was the opinion of the surgeon Hendrik Ulhoorn, who had taken lessons from Bidloo and thought him a clever man (Tweede vertoog, 381).

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Boerhaave assured Morgagni that Ruysch was still fully occupied with anatomical research.7 Giovanni Battista Morgagni, by now thirty-six, had caused a stir as a young man by publishing his Adversaria anatomica, a series of lectures on his anatomical discoveries. After becoming professor of anatomy at the University of Padua, he started in 1717 to publish additional volumes of his Adversaria. Boerhaave saw similarities between Morgagni and Ruysch, and urged the latter to publish his own discoveries in similar fashion. Ruysch responded by publishing his own Adversaria, or ‘anatomical, medical and surgical observations’. To back them up, he was forced to refer to his former collection, now in the tsar’s possession, but he was so busy preparing new material that he was soon able to declare: ‘Through unflagging labour I have once again prepared everything in such a way that it can be seen at my house as well.’8 Ruysch worked steadily on his new collection of anatomical specimens and naturalia. His preparations of human body parts were now augmented by new curiosities, including a fatty tumour that an East Indian surgeon had sent to Caspar Commelin, who had passed it on to Ruysch. Ruysch had also preserved various body parts from a whale, and had exchanged ideas about them with whalers. He had not only preserved but also placed on a pedestal the heart of a maidservant who had thrown her new-born baby into a privy. The maid had eventually died in prison, and Ruysch had used her body for a public dissection. He had also preserved a two-headed dove, a hugely swollen testicle, and a piece of skin from a ‘half-breed Negress’. One bottle contained a testicle so expertly dissected that in Ruysch’s view it surpassed all others he had ever preserved, ‘revealing a large, thick bundle of delicate white silk’. Ruysch now presented specimens that were more elaborate and embellished than ever. His collection contained preparations mounted on other preparations, and tombs lined with blue silk, in which embalmed babies were laid out. Little arms in bottles held prepared leaves or pieces of fruit. The specimens provided proof of all his latest findings. A patch of preserved skin clearly revealed the papillae previously taken to be glands. He showed how an embryo differed from a foetus. The ‘sucker’ on display was actually a crushed, egg-shaped placenta that had remained in the uterus for four months. To underscore

7 8

Corr. Boerhaave II, 81. AW 1013.

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the fact that dead foetuses which remained in the uterus did not necessarily decay, he preserved the brain—the organ that decomposed the fastest—of a calf that had died in the womb and remained there for six months. The brain, though ‘tattered’, had in no way putrefied. Ruysch embellished the tale by stating that the cow had been consumed with gusto by the Hortus’s gardener and his family. Ruysch had meanwhile made some changes to his visiting rules. His collection was no longer open to all interested parties. Some of the rare preparations were guarded more closely to keep people from stealing them and presenting them as their own. The case of the preserved penis that had been snatched from its pedestal had shaken Ruysch: ‘This having made me more cautious, I now feel compelled to grant less freedom to those asking to see my things.’9 Happy just to be making fine preparations, Ruysch was, in fact, still capable of the intellectual rigour necessary for scientific inquiry: whenever he encountered anything of note, he investigated it further, and if his views were contradicted, he gladly defended them. Nathanael Saint-André, a Swiss anatomist who had settled in England, claimed to have found blood vessels in the epidermis, which he allegedly injected with mercury. This prompted Ruysch to publish the details of his separation of the various layers of skin. When he filled the blood vessels in the skin with his red, waxy substance, moistened them with oil of turpentine, and viewed them under a microscope in the sun, they seemed to consist entirely of blood vessels; when the layers of skin were separated, however, the epidermis revealed no such vessels. Ruysch suggested that he and Saint-André make a wager. The money would not be a problem, because they could always ask it of Richard Bradley, who still owed Ruysch the two guineas he had borrowed in 1714 during his stay in Amsterdam.10 Ruysch did not easily forget. For example, he recalled with painful clarity Johann Rau’s treatment of him. Still in the grip of melancholia, Rau had suffered a stroke, and according to the Leiden student Albrecht Haller, he had become a ‘simpleton’.11 The Amsterdam surgeon Bram Titsingh, an admirer of Rau, knew that he had been ‘raving’ for quite

9

AW 1015. AW 1078. Like Bradley, Saint-André was afterward discredited. Owing to his knowledge of German, he was promoted to the position of court anatomist to George I, but made a fool of himself when he examined a woman who claimed to have given birth to rabbits and backed up her story. 11 Haller, Tagebücher, 41. 10

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some time. That summer the governors of Leiden University decided to appoint a lecturer in anatomy, because it was clear that Rau was in no condition to teach. Rau came down with a fever, became dreadfully emaciated, and died in September, reportedly ‘fulminating’ on his deathbed. Titsingh thought that Rau had died from the ill effects of phrenitis, or inflammation of the brain.12 Rau left all his preparations to the university. According to Boerhaave, some of them were very fine, especially the bones. Rau’s collection demonstrated the development of bones, which he had prepared in such a way that colour contrasts marked the distinction between bone and cartilage. Rau’s other preparations were mainly of eyes, and of the scrotum, with its disputed partition. Boerhaave was very pleased to hear that Rau’s successor was to be the young Bernard Siegfried Albinus, who had come as an infant to Leiden when his father became a professor of medicine there. Albinus, only twenty-two and not yet finished with his studies, had shown diligence and talent as Rau’s pupil. In 1718 he had gone to Paris to study with Winslow and Duverney, but because of Rau’s illness had been summoned to Leiden, where he was given an honorary doctorate. Ruysch, too, was pleased with this appointment. Still remembering how Rau had ridiculed his discovery of the tunica Ruyschiana, Ruysch felt vindicated when Albinus showed his pupils a splendid preparation that clearly displayed the membrane. To Ruysch’s satisfaction, Albinus confirmed that the epidermis did not contain any blood vessels. Despite their differences in age and character, as anatomists Albinus and Ruysch had a great deal in common. Albinus was not a good speaker either, but he was very painstaking and skilful in making preparations, and had a keen sense for the aesthetics of presentation.13 A special room had been set up at the university to enable him to illustrate his lectures with preparations. Like Ruysch and Rau, Albinus excelled at delicate work, for which the anatomical theatre was not the ideal place. By this time the old theatre in Leiden was used only once a year for an anatomical demonstration; for the most part it served as a tourist attraction. In the meantime Ruysch was ready to publish his second set of ten Adversaria, taking this opportunity to apologize for not having read

12 13

Titsingh, Steen, 213. See Suringar, Leidsche faculteit. See Punt, Albinus.

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Portrait of the elderly Ruysch, by Jan Wandelaar.

all the anatomical literature, as a result of which he had sometimes wrongly claimed a discovery. He dedicated the work to the Royal Society and sent a copy to Sir Isaac Newton.14 He then set about preparing an edition of his collected works. In 1721 the Opera omnia was published in four volumes; its title page featured a portrait of the elderly Ruysch, drawn from life and engraved by Jan Wandelaar. 14

Corr. Boerhaave II, 83.

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Ruysch still made public appearances. On 23 March 1720, an advertisement appeared in the Amsterdamsche Courant: ‘The professor of anatomy Frederik Ruysch (being in the eighty-third year of his life) intends to make a start—this coming Monday, 25 March, in the Theatrum Anatomicum—on the dissection of a female cadaver, in which he hopes to demonstrate a number of extraordinary things.’ Ruysch continued his public demonstrations until late in 1723, when he gave a final series of anatomy lessons on the body of Jacob Scham, who had been hanged on 11 December. Many physicians and other interested individuals still approached him with their questions—too many, in Ruysch’s opinion, since he could not manage to answer even a quarter of the letters he received.15 Moreover, he was still visited by divers foreign physicians and natural scientists, including such celebrities as Jakob Winslow, the Danish anatomist who had studied with him as a young man. Winslow, who had meanwhile become a member of the Académie des Sciences in Paris, called Ruysch ‘the greatest pioneer among the anatomists of this century’. The Italian natural scientist Count Luigi Ferdinando Marsigli regretted that it had become very difficult to converse with Ruysch, since he had grown so deaf, but he was sufficiently impressed by what he saw to write about it to Sloane and Newton.16 The French surgeon Guillaume Desnoues, famous for his anatomical wax models and also capable of filling, ‘with wondrous precision’, the smallest vessels in the body, wrote admiringly in Ruysch’s guestbook: ‘I have seen the cabinet of Dr Ruysch, and I find that in his profession of anatomist he has achieved everything the art can do, and has surpassed other anatomists with regard to the injection of vessels, having penetrated as far as the finest capillaries; he also uses a liquid of his own making to preserve the body parts of animals and even whole human bodies, in such a way that time does not rob them of their natural colour: in a word, this is one of the most extraordinary anatomists I’ve ever seen in my life, indeed, that the world has ever seen.’17 Ruysch’s visitors included Johann Daniel Schumacher, who was the de facto keeper of the collection in St Petersburg, since Blumentrost was away so often, travelling with the tsar. In February 1721 the 15

Amsterdam University Library, Ruysch to Hecquet, 6 February 1723. British Library, Sloane MS 4046; see McConnell, A Profitable Visit. 17 Amsterdam University Library, MS I E 21, 28 October 1720. See Heister, Redenvoering over den aanwas der ontleedkunde, 97. 16

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tsar sent Schumacher abroad to buy books and other collectibles. His journey through Germany, France, England and the Netherlands brought him to Leiden, where he purchased scientific and mathematical instruments. Schumacher also tried to recruit scholars for the tsar’s planned Academy of Science. In Amsterdam he bought thermometers from the instrument-maker Daniel Gabriel Fahrenheit and naturalia from Albert Seba. He visited the collectors Simon Schijnvoet and Jacob de Wilde, and Ruysch as well, to see if he again had anything to sell. Schumacher reported to the tsar: ‘Professor Ruysch is very old and weak, but hopes with the aid of his injections to perfect the study of anatomy. He has already filled four cabinets with anatomical preparations. Incidentally, the preparations he is now making are not half so good as those he made in earlier years . . . neither Ruysch nor anyone else will ever be able to produce a collection like the one to be found in the museum of Your Imperial Majesty.’18 Discussion with Boerhaave Although Ruysch was not ailing, it was feared that his death was imminent. Much of his knowledge had been recorded in the descriptive catalogues of his collection and other publications, but because he was aware of the limitations of existing anatomical knowledge, he had always hesitated to speculate on the workings of the human body. Even so, his ideas on all kinds of anatomical, physiological and medical questions were still of importance. Herman Boerhaave, famous for his interpretations of the observations of others, tried to persuade Ruysch to speak out on a number of issues. Boerhaave had great faith in Ruysch’s precision and powers of observation, and he was determined to benefit from them for as long as he could. Boerhaave was wrestling with opposing theories of tissue structure and the way bodily fluids were secreted. One theory had been put forward by the late Italian anatomist Marcello Malpighi, who had relied mainly on microscopes to study tissues and considered glands to be of the utmost importance, since he viewed the tissue of most organs as nothing but accumulations of little glands. Ruysch’s view was the opposite of Malpighi’s: he used arterial injection to reveal the

18

Raptschinsky, Frederik Ruysch, 79.

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most subtle parts of the anatomy and considered the vascular system of prime importance. Observing that every organ he injected virtually filled with fluid, he concluded that organs consisted of vessels. Malpighi, on the other hand, thought that the fluid-bearing vessels in the body led to glands, which he saw under the microscope as small sacs with drainage ducts. He believed that such fluids as sweat, saliva, tears and digestive juices were processed in the glands before being secreted. On the basis of his preparations, Ruysch concluded that the globules visible under a microscope actually consisted of a tangle of extremely fine vessels, and that the fluids were processed in those vessels. Boerhaave and Ruysch discussed this matter for hours on end, but Ruysch did not succeed in dispelling Boerhaave’s doubts. He showed him his preparations, giving an elaborate explanation of each one. He demonstrated how he had managed to untangle the extreme vessels of various internal organs, and gave Boerhaave some slices of a prepared human liver to examine. He was sure that Boerhaave would see that it contained no glands. After every discussion, Ruysch seemed amazed at his inability to convince his friend. They agreed to put all their arguments in writing. In the autumn of 1721, Boerhaave addressed Ruysch in a letter intended for publication, in which he defended Malpighi’s theory. He praised Ruysch’s dedicated pursuit of truth and the soundness of his theories, and acknowledged that ‘during the very amicable discussions we have had on this subject, which I shall always remember with pleasure, I have often differed from you less than you concluded from my arguments’. But he had pursued the issue ‘in order to learn those things so much more precisely from you . . . For all that, I cannot deny that there are still many unsolved problems.’ Boerhaave found the discussion important mainly because the outcome was vital to him as a lecturer in physiology. He hoped that Ruysch, by giving precise answers to all his questions and clarifying every issue they touched upon, would elaborate his whole theory, which until now had been revealed only in fragments, scattered among his writings. Boerhaave acknowledged Ruysch’s mastery of the technique of arterial injection: ‘I believe that your unique skills are so great as to be unsurpassed by any other anatomist.’19 Nonetheless, he insisted that

19

AW 1178.

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Ruysch had not made a thorough study of Malpighi’s work, no doubt because Ruysch had always concentrated on the art of dissection. Boerhaave also suggested a disturbing reason for the differing viewpoints of the two men, namely a distortion caused by the technique of arterial injection: it was possible that the sacs seen by Malpighi had been distorted beyond recognition by Ruysch’s injections. Moreover, Ruysch left organs to soak in water, which might cause all the tissue outside the injected vessels to dissolve. This would mean that Ruysch’s method, while suitable for making very fine vessels visible, did not, as he claimed, give the body the appearance it had when alive. According to Boerhaave, it appeared from Ruysch’s preparations that the extreme vessels emanating from the arteries ended in open channels that secreted fluid, inside or outside the body. This could be seen in the skin, mouth, throat, intestines and stomach, for instance. In Boerhaave’s opinion, however, there was yet another kind of secretion, via the glands, whereby blood vessels deposited their fluids in small sacs with drainage ducts. In those sacs—the glands—the fluid was, if not processed, at least stored. Ruysch had previously given Boerhaave a number of preparations to send to Morgagni, who in this debate was the scientific heir to Malpighi. Now Boerhaave also sent Morgagni the manuscript of his apologia for Malpighi, and told him that he had been compelled to write it by the good Ruysch, who stubbornly clung to his own standpoint. He also informed Morgagni of the imminent publication of Ruysch’s collected works, the best anatomical work ever produced in the Netherlands, according to Boerhaave, who promised that Ruysch would send a copy to Italy.20 In response to Boerhaave’s objections, Ruysch sent several prepared muscles, including one from an arm, to Leiden. Boerhaave, observing the extreme ends of the arteries through a microscope, admitted that they discharged the waxy substance in the form of dew, but saw no hollow, membranous sacs with drainage ducts. The written reply of the eighty-four-year-old Ruysch was some months in coming. He expressed surprise at the lengthy account sent by Boerhaave, whom he called his best friend, and said that he would prefer to leave the writings of Malpighi and others out of the discus-

20

Corr. Boerhaave II, 85, 87.

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sion. ‘You grieve me, forcing me time and again to speak out reluctantly against this great man’, he impressed upon Boerhaave. ‘If only he were alive and I could discuss this matter with him.’ It was regrettable that Malpighi had died before Ruysch had perfected his injection technique; Malpighi, after all, had never seen his best preparations. In any case, Ruysch preferred to rely entirely on his own observations, as usual, repeating for the umpteenth time: ‘One should base one’s opinion not on words or authority, but on one’s own experience and findings . . . If you could only show me such a simple gland, there would be no need for long descriptions with so many words and arguments.’ That was the problem: no one could demonstrate those glands. Malpighi thought he had seen glands under a microscope, but there was no way of knowing for sure. Using a microscope, Ruysch had also seen corpuscles in kidneys, but they were so minute that he could not say for certain whether they were glands. Ruysch reminded Boerhaave that he had examined under various microscopes several livers he had prepared. He had coated those preparations with oil before ‘holding them in bright sunlight’, whereupon Boerhaave had seen clearly that branches of the portal vein disappeared into tiny nuclei. Boerhaave had been forced to admit that the nuclei seemed to consist of countless tiny ducts that emanated from the artery—ducts so minuscule as to be visible only under a strong microscope. Moreover, Boerhaave had recently written to Ruysch to tell him that, apart from the vessels, there was nothing to be seen in those nuclei. Ruysch knew that this could not be due to Boerhaave’s eyesight: ‘I have always observed that your eyesight is as sharp as anyone’s, and that you are accustomed to using microscopes in a very precise way.’ Ruysch suggested that they call the nuclei ‘pulp-like extremities of the portal vein’. ‘It would be nice if your activities did not hinder you so much, so that you could stay with me longer’, Ruysch complained to his friend. He urged Boerhaave to ‘stay, not just one short hour, as you usually do, but entire days’, so that he would be able to see all the preparations Ruysch had made since the sale of his collection. After all, in order to theorize upon tissue structure, it was necessary, Ruysch said, to examine and compare various preparations of the same organ. Boerhaave had put forward the idea that glands were repositories for fluids, which would make them tantamount to rain barrels. According to Ruysch, however, the glands were the site of continuous activity. His objection to Boerhaave’s theory lay, in fact, in the definition of glands

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as sacs with drainage ducts. That definition excluded the vessels, which in his view were the most important part of the gland. He had often heard the arguments Boerhaave had advanced against his technique of arterial injection, but he simply disagreed: ‘This art merely makes visible that which was previously invisible, having collapsed after death.’ Ruysch assured Boerhaave that ‘if you had seen me applying my technique of filling the vessels, you would say . . . how is it possible that an old man of eighty-five, who has been toiling night and day for so long, can still see, find and handle vessels as fine as cobwebs!’ Clearly, he was suggesting that his level of experience precluded ignorance of the potential shortcomings of his method. Boerhaave’s criticism had, of course, been a means of goading Ruysch, but he refused to rise to the bait, and said that if anyone else had written that letter, he would have suspected him of trying to trick him into divulging his method: ‘But I do not wish to make it known in this way, which is why I shall not answer all of your arguments as precisely as you might wish.’ Ruysch stressed yet again that Malpighi had died too soon. He was convinced that if the Italian had seen his preparations, he would have changed his mind. Malpighi had been forced to examine dead organs, despite all the drawbacks of that method of research, whereas Ruysch could examine bodies that were ‘seemingly restored to life’: ‘I do not deny that other methods must be applied, in addition to injecting the wax-like substance, because I myself have done that everywhere . . . I have investigated everything with so much precision and careful consideration that you can safely trust that it is as I have described it.’ He left it up to Boerhaave, however, to pass judgement, ‘because I think that you understand best all my anatomical findings and because you have read Malpighi so assiduously and for so many years that you know him by heart’. Ruysch enclosed in his letter a drawing of the curious picture presented by the vascular system in the round glands of the mesentery, the intestinal membrane. This discovery, which he had made three years earlier, had caused him to jump for joy. It was difficult to depict such extremely thin vessels, but Jan Wandelaar—‘the most experienced of all engravers’, who always made illustrations with great skill and fidelity—had taken it upon himself to make the engraving with the aid of a microscope. ‘He accomplished this with the help of Dr Cant, as true to life as you now see it’, according to Ruysch, who went on to say that neither he nor Wandelaar could have made the illustration

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Fig. 44 Vessels in the glands of the mesentery. Ruysch’s injection technique enabled him to see that these glands consisted of ‘a special kind of blood vessel’, surrounded by a membrane, but without a secretion duct. Though it was difficult to depict them, Jan Wandelaar succeeded with the aid of a microscope and the assistance of Arent Cant. The depiction was enclosed with the above-quoted letter to Herman Boerhaave (1722).

without the skilful assistance of the discerning Arent Cant. ‘Can you not see the fibres, as fine as virgin wool, even their tangled nature clearly depicted?’ Such a thing could be drawn only by an expert in anatomy as well as painting. Cant excelled in both, and because these two disciplines were close to Ruysch’s heart, he held the young man in particularly high regard, so much so that he urged him to give lessons in the anatomical theatre. Arent Cant, a native of Dordrecht, had studied in Leiden and Paris. After obtaining his doctorate, he had gone to Ruysch with plans for

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an ambitious project, namely to publish an anatomical work for which he was already making the illustrations.21 Ruysch was enthusiastic, and undoubtedly hoped that this new work would consign Bidloo’s atlas to oblivion. Cant was assisted in this undertaking by Jan Wandelaar, who had been illustrating Ruysch’s publications for quite some time. Wandelaar’s talent had been noticed while he was still at school, and his parents, who were shopkeepers, had grudgingly allowed him to take drawing lessons. Jan’s father wanted him to go into trade, so upon leaving school, he was given the choice of becoming a merchant’s apprentice or going to sea. When Jan decided to become a sailor, his parents gave in and allowed him to become apprenticed to the engraver Jacob Folkema. He also studied at the drawing academy run by Gerard de Lairesse, until De Lairesse went blind, and Wandelaar and Amsterdam’s other young artists were given a studio where they could practise life drawing. Wandelaar, who ended up working for Ruysch, found it useful to acquire anatomical skills. Ruysch, in turn, benefited from Wandelaar’s ability to incise directly onto the copper plate without first making the usual preparatory drawing.22 Ruysch sent Boerhaave the preparation Wandelaar had depicted with the aid of a microscope, making quite sure to tell him that ‘in order to see those nuclei, the object must be held in bright sunlight, coming from behind the viewer’s back’.23 For years the questions of tissue structure and the secretion of fluids remained matters of dispute, but the publication of the letters concluded the public debate between Ruysch and Boerhaave. That summer Herman Boerhaave was stricken by a lengthy illness, and to flee from the constant stream of people wishing to consult him, he had acquired a country estate on the canal between Leiden and Haarlem. He continued, however, to spend part of each summer with Ruysch.

21 See Krivatsky, Le Blon. Coloured illustrations of Ruysch’s preparations were published after his death by Jan Ladmiral, a pupil of Le Blon. 22 See AW 972. In 1718 Wandelaar designed the title page for Hendrik Ruysch’s edition of Jonston’s Theatrum universale. He then worked for Frederik Ruysch, ‘spending a number of years making copper engravings of many anatomical drawings’ (Van Gool, Nieuwe schouburg II, 174). 23 AW 1195–1227.

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Fig. 45 Portrait of Herman Boerhaave (1668–1738), by Jan Wandelaar. (Iconographic Bureau)

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Plant Anatomy The supply of corpses had dried up, so Boerhaave urged Ruysch to examine the internal structure of bones, since he was convinced that the last word had not yet been written on the subject.24 With his usual intensity, Ruysch gave himself over entirely to bone research, sometimes working throughout the night: ‘I have carefully examined various bones by breaking, splitting, and sawing through them with a very fine saw in the most ingenious way’, he reported, having called upon an ‘alert artist . . . whose skill I made use of to saw through these bones lengthwise’. Despite his apparent enthusiasm, bones were not Ruysch’s primary interest. To be sure, he had begun his career by studying bones, but then as well, through lack of anything better to examine. He certainly did not want to end his career with them, so he turned to another project. In February 1723, when he sent his published correspondence with Boerhaave to his friend Philippe Hecquet in Paris, he told Hecquet that he had already spent several years examining the structure of fruit, and intended to publish a piece on the subject in the third volume of his Adversaria.25 Boerhaave drew the attention of his friend William Sherard to it: ‘Mr Ruysch has produced marvellous skeletons of plants, and has turned them into a very beautiful and edifying collection. I shall try and persuade him to send you some.’26 Sherard (who had returned in 1716 from Smyrna) sent, as a token of his interest, various dried plants and seeds to Amsterdam. In the third volume of the Adversaria—dedicated to Jan Trip, burgomaster of Amsterdam and supervisor of the Hortus—Ruysch announced that he had delved into the anatomy of fruits and leaves. He explained in detail how he had dissected plants, and pointed out their similarities to human organs.27 It seemed to him that the ripe pears in his garden were simply begging to be examined, so he resolved to dissect and prepare fruits and plants in the same way as humans and animals. He began with the sap-vessels of fruit and proceeded to those in leaves, discovering that a pear could be compared with a spleen. After pears he moved on to apricots, peaches and plums, and then to

24 25 26 27

AW 1069. Amsterdam University Library, Ruysch to Hecquet, 6 February 1723. Corr. Boerhaave I, 115. See Dandy, Sloane Herbarium, 149. AW 1060.

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such vegetables as celery and parsley, and concluded that the vessels of those plants corresponded to the blood vessels in humans. After detailed comparative study, Ruysch came to the conclusion that the sap-vessels, the ‘blood vessels’ of fruit, conveyed substances to the pulp that determined the nature and quality of the fruit. In his view, something similar was true of human organs such as the spleen and the liver. He saw his findings as confirmation of his theory that the processing of both plant saps and bodily fluids occurred in vessels. The dissection of plants had strengthened him in his conviction ‘that everything that serves to maintain the human body—such as sperm, milk, blood, saliva and gall—is processed in the vessels; this theory, though new, is nonetheless true’, he assured his readers.28 In order to preserve the sap-vessels, Ruysch had to remove the surrounding pulp. He explained how he had attempted this with the help of insects, but they ‘did not follow instructions very closely’ and had eaten up the vessels along with the fruit pulp. After deploying various kinds of insects, he finally performed this task with his own fingers.29 He had also dissected turnips, a vegetable he heartily recommended: beneficial to the ill and infirm, and easy to digest, turnips had a therapeutic effect on scurvy, consumption, cough and thrush. In 1724 Ruysch published a descriptive inventory of some of the specimens he had assembled since the sale of his original collection to the tsar.30 His descriptions were accompanied by illustrations supplied by Jan Wandelaar and Jacob Folkema. It was an inventory of more than two hundred objects, both anatomical and botanical, installed on pedestals in a large cabinet with nine shelves. Among them were a number of surprising objects, such as a cap made from the skin of a child, which Ruysch thought very beautiful. He was also extremely pleased with the transverse cross-section of a penis. A recent acquisition—the bones of a foetus that had remained in the uterus for more than a year—had been recovered in August 1722 by the surgeon Pieter Plaatman, who had removed the foetus by making an incision near the woman’s navel, a daring operation that was entirely successful. The woman had recovered well from the operation, which Ruysch found so interesting that he planned to write about it separately. 28

AW 1133. AW 904. See also AW 801, 867, 874. 30 AW 861. Ruysch’s collection also contained ‘a piece of the spleen of a spinster, approximately twenty-five years of age, prepared without arterial injection . . . this object is very dear to me, for reasons I cannot mention here’ (AW 919). 29

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Fig. 46

403

The skeleton of a pear, by J. Folkema, from De laatste oefeningen van Frederik Ruysch.

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Ruysch’s collection was organized around well-known themes. In a wooden grave lay the snow-white skeleton of a foetus holding a mayfly in its right hand. ‘The same hour that gave me life also took it from me’, read the accompanying text. A calf ’s head displayed a vascular system so extraordinary that it seemed to Ruysch that God had created it in order to reveal His power and glory. The botanical section exuded the same atmosphere. Ruysch quoted Thomas à Kempis: ‘Every bush and every herb proclaims God’s might.’ He presented the skeleton of a pear, which showed ‘that pears consist of sap-vessels, just as the spleen in our body consists of blood vessels’. His collection also included boxes of herbs and flowers from the West and East Indies, of which Ruysch said, not for the first time: ‘I keep these boxes as living herbals, in which the flowers retain their natural shape and colour for many years.’31 In his preface Ruysch stated that he had decided to publish this inventory because he had discovered all kinds of things he wished to share with the world of science before his death. He dedicated the publication to Tsar Peter, who had done him the honour of viewing his preparations with rapt attention, and sent a copy to Blumentrost. It is not known whether the tsar ever saw the book, however, because he died a short while later. Blumentrost had summoned Nicolaas Bidloo to attend the patient, and had written to Boerhaave to ask his advice, but to no avail. Peter died on 28 January 1725. Ruysch sent a copy of his descriptive inventory to Philippe Hecquet in Paris; in the accompanying letter he said that only God knew whether it would be his last work. The following summer he sent Hecquet a letter in Dutch, which Hecquet had to have translated into French twice. Ruysch had written on a narrow, oblong sheet of paper, and because he had started out in rhyme, the first translator had assumed it was a poem: He who must needs slave, sweat, toil and guard, Performing also duties which are hard, And seeking to bind folk to piety, Will in the end, alas, deceivèd be!

But Ruysch had continued thus: ‘What I refer to, dear sir, requires no explanation.’ Hecquet would undoubtedly have understood the subject

31

AW 867, 1059.

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at hand. Doubts had been cast on his theory of digestion, and misunderstanding was a theme close to Ruysch’s heart. He considered Hecquet’s theory a structure ‘not built on sand, but on a rock, just as firm as it is itself, tanquam inconcussum, upon which I have long put my seal.’ Ruysch told Hecquet about the scepticism provoked by his forays into the field of plant anatomy: ‘After all, a century ago no one thought that the time would come when mankind would call upon plants for help, but now, through God’s great grace, we have come to this, to the amazement of many.’32 Final Work Ruysch’s excursions into plant anatomy provoked surprise more than anything else. Abraham Vater—Ruysch’s former pupil and meanwhile a professor at the University of Wittenberg—understood that Ruysch had demonstrated, through the dissection of plants, the similarity between the circulation of sap in plants and bodily fluids in humans. He was surprised, but mostly at the fact that Ruysch had even tackled such a project. ‘It is truly beyond belief that an old man of nearly ninety can still apply himself to the contemplation of such subtle matters.’33 Johann Friedrich Schreiber—who later became a professor in St Petersburg—was a young man from Königsberg in East Prussia who had come to Holland to study with Boerhaave and Albinus. Schreiber was full of admiration for the elderly man’s ability to do such delicate work with his stiff, calloused, fingers. Another student from Königsberg, Johann Christoph Bohle, had seen Ruysch at work, dissecting pears, plums and apricots, and told him in a letter that he had witnessed his elation: ‘The benefit gained from this caused you, as usual, to jump for joy and gasp with amazement.’34 Bohle knew Ruysch’s habits so well because he had spent a lot of time with him. Feeling that too little anatomical research was undertaken in his native country, he had gone to Holland to study with Boerhaave and Ruysch. According to another German student, H.F. Gross, Bohle would have done just as well to go east, to St Petersburg, from which

32

Amsterdam University Library, Ruysch to Hecquet, 4 June 1725. See AW 1097– 1098. 33 AW 1129. 34 AW 1233.

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city Gross wrote to a friend: ‘The facilities for anatomy are no worse here than in Paris . . . I’m convinced that if many German medical students knew of the possibilities here to practise anatomy as much as they like, they would prefer to spend less money travelling here over Lübeck than to go to Paris or to Ruysch in Amsterdam.’35 Bohle, who had received his doctorate in Leiden, had become Ruysch’s self-styled assistant. The two men often met to discuss anatomy. Ruysch liked him because of his enthusiasm and intelligent observations, his ‘aptitude’ and the pleasant conversations they had. Like Boerhaave—or perhaps even at his urging—Bohle tried to obtain as much information as possible from the elderly anatomist. Bohle spent days looking at preparations under a microscope and discussing them with Ruysch. One of the topics they discussed was the cerebral cortex. Viewing it under the microscope seemed to confirm Malpighi’s theory, thought Bohle, ‘because if you see the outer grey matter, where it is connected to the pia mater, you will see, as I do, a similar system of very soft, compressed arteries and a jumble of egg-shaped, glandular bodies’. One would swear that they were glands, but Ruysch had demonstrated that those round bodies were nothing but a collection of the most subtle vessels, which ended in a pasty pulp. During his conversations with Ruysch, Bohle had suggested a solution. In a letter intended for publication, he proposed to the old master (as Boerhaave had done before him) that his injections might distort the very thing he was trying to demonstrate. Ruysch would have to agree that his ‘turpentined’ wax penetrated to the very soft vessels in the pia mater, even though in anatomized corpses those vessels were never filled with blood, any more than they were in living people. Soaking the injected membrane again might cause the insufficiently filled vessels (which were intertwined) to ‘disentangle’ and absorb the injected wax. In other words, soaking the brain in water might produce results that were misleading. It was known that soaking caused vessels to detach, since afterwards the water would be cloudy and flocculent. Bohle concluded that perhaps the vessels in the cerebral cortex were not blood vessels after all, and suggested that the cerebral cortex served to transport spiritus animalis. The concept of spiritus animalis, which harked back to the physiology of Aristotle and Galen, had meanwhile been so discredited by mechanistic explanations that it was seldom if ever

35

H.F. Gross to I.F.A. von Uffenbach, quoted by Radziun, Zur Geschichte, 197.

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mentioned. The existence of spiritus animalis had been emphatically denied by Govert Bidloo, but Bohle thought that these ‘animal spirits’ had perhaps been banned from medicine a little too hastily. He could imagine that the vessels in the cerebral cortex transported the ‘very beginnings of the animal spirits’, which were produced by the minute vessels of the pia mater.36 Ruysch had often asked himself why the arteries in the brain were so thin. He had sometimes connected the thin substance to the spiritus animalis, which he imagined to be corpuscles, ‘like brandy that has been distilled so often that if someone wanted to pour it, drop by drop, from a high place, not a drop of it would fall on the earth, but evaporate on the way’.37 Ruysch thought it very clever of Bohle to develop a theory to explain this, though he himself had little faith in speculative reflections that sounded plausible but lacked a firm foundation. ‘In this century we have, by the grace of God, obtained truer and more accurate knowledge of the human body’, but physicians could not afford to rest on their laurels, because even though ‘we have explored more in our century than our predecessors ever imagined’, so much was still unknown. This was also true of the cerebral cortex, of which he knew only that it consisted of ‘arterial shoots ending in pulp’. According to Ruysch, the corpuscles that Bohle thought he had seen under the microscope existed only in his imagination. Bohle would never be able to demonstrate their existence.38 By now Frederik Ruysch had filled eight cabinets with preparations and installed them in the large room of his house on the Bloemgracht. The collection could be visited twice a week. On 26 October 1725, Ruysch was visited by a student of Boerhaave, Albrecht Haller, a native of Switzerland who had studied medicine for a year and a half in Tübingen before going to Leiden to study with Boerhaave and Albinus. Haller, a child prodigy, had never really taken Ruysch seriously, because he was not widely read. But still wishing to meet the famous anatomist—undoubtedly at Boerhaave’s urging—he travelled to Amsterdam and proceeded to the house on the Bloemgracht. There he met an eighty-seven-year-old man—slightly doddering and deaf, but nonetheless lucid and hard-working—who gave him a tour of his

36 37 38

AW 1231–1242. AW 798. AW 1251.

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collection. ‘The room is not large, but contains beautiful paintings’, Haller observed. ‘All the preparations are nicely decorated.’ The delicacy of the preparations impressed Haller. Ruysch showed him his recent work, including ‘anatomized leaves from all sorts of trees’, some of which were ‘extraordinarily fine’. Haller knew, of course, that Ruysch had sold his collection to the tsar, so there was less to see than before, but what there was, was extremely worthwhile. He admired a child’s head with a natural-looking complexion in which all the pores in the skin were clearly visible, and marvelled at muscles that had been untangled ‘with the greatest of skill’. He appreciated Ruysch’s art of filling the vessels: ‘The preparations thus made of the liver, spleen, brain and heart are truly extraordinary’, he declared. He could imagine that Ruysch impressed lay people with his ability to preserve children’s heads and even whole bodies in such a way that they retained their colour, shape and natural glow. Haller knew—indeed, it was general knowledge—that Ruysch’s impressive preparations depended on his secret method. According to Haller, Rau had tried to imitate that method, as had Bernard Siegfried Albinus, who thought that Ruysch possessed not so much a secret recipe as exceptional skill, which consisted in soaking the body parts for a long time in water and injecting them patiently with a liquid substance that took some time to solidify. ‘Those beautiful preparations of leaves were made by means of heat and the most delicate among them by means of water’, Haller surmised. The following spring, in April 1726, Haller paid Ruysch another visit. Ruysch had recently lost, in quick succession, a twenty-five-yearold grandson and his forty-three-year-old daughter Maria Jacoba, and these deaths had evidently taken their toll on him. Haller, at any rate, thought that Ruysch’s health had declined since his previous visit, and noted: ‘I went again to see old Ruysch. His conversation has become arduous, and he was vainglorious, small-minded and childish.’39 Ruysch now accompanied his visitors only on the ground floor. All the same, Haller returned to the house on the Bloemgracht at the end of the summer, on 27 August. Ruysch was working on the inventory of his collection, being bent on publishing another volume. ‘I believe that his time has almost come, because he can no longer find the lock on his door’, noted Haller, who on this visit also met Johann

39

Haller, Tagebücher, 45, 47.

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Christoph Bohle.40 He observed that Bohle found great favour with the old man, who took leave of him with extreme cordiality. Haller thought Elisabeth, the daughter still living at home, unattractive and even ‘rather disagreeable’. Ruysch and his daughter lived very frugally: Bohle was given only stockfish to eat. The new collection, by this time large enough to be valuable, could now be said to contain the final work of Frederik Ruysch, whose reputation had grown since the sale of his previous collection. In Europe there was a great deal of interest in his work. Ruysch regularly sent preparations to Hecquet, and in the summer of 1726 Bohle took some preparations to Paris. In 1727 Ruysch received a request to send a few preparations to Dresden. The request had come from Johann Heinrich von Heucher, on behalf of Friedrich August, Elector of Saxony and King of Poland. Von Heucher was the keeper of his collection, which was preserved in Dresden. Friedrich August, who was nearing sixty, was known as an art lover. In his younger days he had spent two years travelling to various European courts, including that of Louis XIV and the courts in Madrid and Lisbon. In Florence he had seen the collection of rarities in the Uffizi. In 1694, when he succeeded his elder brother as Elector of Saxony, Dresden already had a Kunstkammer with seven rooms, an anatomy room, a library, a numismatic cabinet, an armoury and a room of court silver, which his predecessors had been filling up since 1560. The collection was already famous—in June 1698, Tsar Peter visited it on his way back to Russia—but there was serious rivalry among the courts of Vienna, Dresden, Munich, Berlin, Wolfenbüttel, Mannheim, Stuttgart, Hanover, Kassel and Düsseldorf. Certainly since becoming King of Poland, Friedrich August had been trying to add royal allure to his residences in Warsaw and Dresden. In the years 1705– 1708 he had had a new palace built in Dresden, and in the same period he had appointed as his personal physician Heinrich Erndtl, who had studied in Amsterdam with Ruysch. In 1713 he had brought Von Heucher to Dresden. A professor at Wittenberg, Von Heucher had been instrumental in setting up the university’s hortus botanicus and anatomical cabinet. Friedrich August (who had visited Holland in 1710) had turned Dresden into a lively centre of culture. He was an avid collector of

40

Haller, Tagebücher, 75.

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Dutch, German and Italian paintings, Roman statues, Chinese porcelain, scientific instruments, coins and weapons, and planned to establish a picture gallery, a mathematical-physical salon (a museum displaying clocks and scientific instruments) and a natural history museum, which would possibly house Ruysch’s collection. The preparations Ruysch sent to Dresden included a cerebral cortex and a foetus of five or six months. Friedrich August was impressed, as was Friedrich Wilhelm, King of Prussia, who was visiting Dresden in January 1728. The Elector sent Ruysch 100 golden nobles, whereupon Ruysch offered to sell him his entire collection of specimens, his library and his secret method of preparation (even though he had supposedly sold his secret to the late tsar). In October 1728, Ruysch sent the obliging Bohle to Dresden, with a few skeletons of plants, to negotiate the terms of sale. To his disappointment, however, no agreement could be reached. Perhaps it was too early: in 1727 Friedrich August had begun on the extension of his palace, the Grüne Gewölbe, and it was not until that building project was nearly complete, in September 1729, that he began to collect on a large scale. Father and Son Tragic circumstances had prompted Ruysch to intensify his association with Bohle. In some ways Bohle became a substitute for Hendrik, Ruysch’s only son, who was probably the only one who knew the secret of his preparation technique. Several years earlier the father and son had succeeded in preparing the body of a five-year-old boy so well ‘that he looked completely alive, for all the internal organs had a perfectly glowing, lively colour, and the face had rosy cheeks, just like a live, healthy person’.41 That could no longer be said of Hendrik, however, now a man of fifty and not in good health. Haller had heard that Hendrik’s ‘guzzling and whoring’ had made him incapable of doing any serious work. The previous year Frederik Ruysch had written that his son was helping him to build up a new collection, but meanwhile something had snapped in Hendrik.42 Perhaps he had hoped that his father would now help him with his own collection, which for more than thirty 41 42

AW 1221. AW 1099.

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years had remained in the shadow of his father’s, as had all his work. In 1718, after the sale of his father’s collection, Hendrik had drawn attention to his own collection by publishing a descriptive inventory of his Asiatic fish, complete with a dedication to Herman Boerhaave and a title page by Jan Wandelaar. It went unnoticed, however. Early on he had been called Frederik Ruysch’s ‘faithful assistant’, the man who, during his father’s lessons, took the specimens out of their jars and boxes, handed them over carefully, and put them away again.43 Sadly, the true extent of Hendrik’s capabilites never became clear. When Frederik Ruysch perfected his preparation technique, he said he had done so together with Hendrik, but since that time his son’s anatomical skills had faded into the background. There were always ‘curious’ people coming to look at Hendrik’s collection, but the last time anyone signed his album amicorum had been on 9 June 1725, at which time Guillaume Desnoues had written: ‘I had the honour of seeing Mr Ruysch’s son and his anatomical works, and he appears to assist his father with dignity.’44 That was naturally intended as a compliment, but it is possible that such compliments were the death of Hendrik. Ironically, Frederik Ruysch, who had grown up without a father, had been a formidable presence in his own son’s life. It is not inconceivable that Hendrik (whose wife had died childless) had become seriously depressed. According to Bohle, in the end Hendrik could no longer stand the smell of corpses. That smell dominated the autumn of 1727. There were so many cases of illness in the city that the anxious burgomasters asked the Collegium Medicum for advice. Every bed in the hospital was filled, and a large number of patients had to be sent to the pest-house, where two extra physicians were on duty, one of whom fell ill. The city was afflicted with an infectious ‘hot fever’, the precise nature of which was unknown. As the epidemic spread throughout the country, mortality rose to three times its normal rate. One of the victims was Hendrik Ruysch, who died in October at the age of fifty-four. According to Schreiber, he was a popular physician, ‘very experienced in natural history; in his day one of the most distinguished botanists in all of the Netherlands’.45 Petiver had called him ‘a very curious naturalist’, and

43 44 45

Medicus politicus, 76–77. Amsterdam University Library, MS I E 36, 20 October 1720. Schreiber, Leven, 7–9.

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even Rau had not been able to deny that he was a capable botanist. Haller, who had come to know Hendrik only recently, described him as a ‘useless person’ and thought his death no great loss. Hendrik’s father, of course, was stricken. Though sorely disappointed by his behaviour in recent years, he was deeply grieved by his death. Because Rau had written deprecatingly that Hendrik was forced to assist his father whenever he stammered out a lesson, Frederik Ruysch had once said in public that Rau would have every reason to rejoice if a son or daughter of his were to reach Hendrik’s age and prove to have been of as much help to him.46 In those days Hendrik was still a promising young man, destined to take the torch from his father. At the time, one of Ruysch’s pupils had described Hendrik as ‘your well-loved and only son, valiant follower of his father’s virtues, and faithful companion in your work’. The pupil had expressed his hope that ‘the skills of both of you will further reveal the secrets of the human body’.47 Those days were past. The loss of his only son put Frederik Ruysch’s life in a different light. Hendrik would have been his natural successor, but now it became clear that all of Frederik’s offices would fall vacant upon his death, since he had not trained any of his grandsons or sonsin-law. Elisabeth, his youngest daughter, might have had the necessary knowledge, but as a woman she was not eligible to hold public office or even to become a physician. Another important question was what would happen to his preparation method. Quite possibly Johann Christoph Bohle hoped to be told the secret. There was speculation on the matter, but it was not unlikely that Ruysch would take his secret with him to the grave. Haller, who expected this to happen, said: ‘He will not easily give away his secret.’ He might still sell it, but it was also possible that he had already sold it to Tsar Peter. No one knew for sure.

46 47

AW 386. AW 290.

CHAPTER TEN

RUYSCH’S LEGACY At 10 p.m. on 8 November 1723 a fire broke out in the Weigh House, in the upstairs quarters used by the surgeons’ guild. A careless act on the part of the servant had caused the wooden wall between the landing and the guildhall to catch fire. The flames were extinguished quickly, but one of the two famous paintings by Rembrandt, The Anatomy Lesson of Dr Joan Deijman, which had been hanging on the wooden wall, appeared to be irreparably damaged. The Anatomy Lesson of Dr Frederik Ruysch was spared, but Ruysch’s days of glory were long past. His new interest, the anatomy of fruits and plants, had been prompted by a lack of corpses to dissect. At first he had tried to console himself with the ‘diversions’ of his garden, but he had soon made a virtue of necessity and started to dissect plants, confessing that he found it impossible to waste even one day in idle pursuits. In 1726 Ruysch wrote to Johann Christoph Bohle that in the past year he had dissected only one corpse. He complained to the burgomasters, telling them that the hospital regents were refusing to give him bodies. The regents thought the anatomists pretentious, and maintained that there were far fewer suitable corpses—that is, ‘strangers’ with no blood relations in the town—than they imagined.1 Unwilling to deal with the matter further, the burgomasters declared their intention of leaving the distribution of corpses to the regents of the hospital. Any problems that arose could be put to the Collegium Medicum for arbitration. Ruysch promptly complained to the Collegium about the regents’ unrelenting opposition. In the old days, he had been allowed to go to the chairman’s home to report his intention to dissect a body, but now he was required to go to his office. Previously the corpses had been discreetly brought through the door dividing the ‘stable’ (as the morgue was popularly called) from the dissecting room, but this door had been closed off, first by blocking it with chairs and benches, then by dumping a pile of peat in front of it. Now that the bodies

1

Amsterdam City Archives, Collegium Medicum archive; hospital archive 1019.

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had to be carried outside on a stretcher, everyone could see who was about to be cut open. Since as far back as 1673, unwanted babies that had been drowned (and given to the hospital for burial by those who found them) had been handed over to Ruysch. After performing the autopsy, if he considered them useful for study or preservation, he had taken them home with him, but this was no longer allowed either. Ruysch complained, saying that for years he had gone to the hospital in search of the female corpses he needed to teach anatomy to the midwives, and had ordered them to be brought quietly, as custom dictated, to the theatrum anatomicum. After serving as teaching material, such corpses had been fetched by a hospital servant and taken away for burial. The same procedure had been followed with the cadavers used in the lessons Ruysch gave to the surgeons, lessons that were becoming less frequent owing to the lack of bodies. The midwives had appealed to him to remedy the situation, but he had been forced to tell them that his last request for a female corpse had been answered very brusquely. He saw no alternative but to present the Collegium Medicum with the following demands: free access to the hospital to view the ‘strangers’ among the deceased and choose those suitable for dissection; permission to report this directly to the chairman (at his home, not his office); the re-opening of the door between the morgue and the dissecting room; permission to keep the bodies of dead children after performing an autopsy; and a steady supply of corpses for teaching purposes.2 Possible Successors It was too late, however. Ruysch no longer enjoyed any political protection, and his position as praelector of the surgeons’ guild had been given de facto to someone else. He was nearly ninety, and the time was fast approaching when he would no longer be able to work. In fact, he had already thought about stopping, but was reluctant to do so because of the daily torrent of requests for answers to numerous anatomical questions. Most importantly, he was still curious and relatively energetic. This was confirmed by Haller, who had seen during his visits that Ruysch was busy not just with his collection but with

2

Amsterdam City Archives, Collegium Medicum archive 3, fol. 127.

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his medical practice too, advising the many people who still came to consult him. Having no natural successor and thus no reason to step down, Ruysch clung to his post as professor of anatomy, though he no longer wielded the same authority as before. Indeed, vehement attempts were being made to undermine what authority he still had, since it was clear that his life was drawing to a close. The competition among his possible successors had led them to question the value of his lessons, thus sparking a debate on the efficacy of various teaching methods. The result was a power struggle, marked by the usual personal rivalries, though its actual aim was the emancipation of the surgeons. Ruysch had been appointed praelector to give scientifically grounded training to the surgeons, who generally lacked an academic background and were therefore considered incapable of providing such training themselves. But times had changed, and there were now a number of surgeons with university educations who were qualified to give theoretical instruction as well. They had an edge over Ruysch, because their anatomical knowledge was coupled with surgical experience, but despite this advantage, there was still resistance to the idea that surgeons could function as professors. That resistance stemmed from fear of competition, but also from social conservatism. Surgeons were reputed to be rough customers lacking in the social graces. Bidloo and Rau were good examples: everyone agreed that they were competent surgeons and anatomists, but their behaviour was far from exemplary. In his eulogy to Rau, Albinus excused the man’s bluntness. It was true that Rau had been exceptionally ambitious, but he had sought honour and glory through meritorious service, not through cunning or flattery. His occasional outbursts of temper had stemmed from his refusal to tolerate the propagation of false ideas. Rau had often been reproached for uncouth behaviour, but given his humble background, Albinus thought it a wonder he had achieved such success. Ruysch had always worked closely with outstanding surgeons—such as Pieter Adriaansz, Allard Cyprianus and Andries Boekelman—who despite their grounding in anatomy, were unpretentious and disinclined to oppose him. Moreover, Ruysch had supported intelligent and ambitious young people who had sought him out as a teacher, and had bestowed a great deal of attention on some of them, taking pleasure in sharing his knowledge and being stimulated by their questions in turn. This master-pupil relationship was very fruitful as long as the division

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of roles remained clear, but any pupil who showed signs of becoming too independent was viewed as a threat. Thus Ruysch’s ‘favourite pupil’ was always in a precarious position, and the presence of Hendrik Ruysch had prevented the emergence of any other heir apparent. The first one to present himself as a possible successor to Ruysch was Lorenz Heister. After studying in Amsterdam with both Ruysch and Rau, Heister had continued his training by working as a surgeon in the allied army opposing the French in Brabant. A number of bloody battles, such as those at Oudenaarde and Malplaquet—fought in the context of the War of Spanish Succession—provided surgeons with a great deal of work, all of which could be chalked up to experience. Heister, who already had a university degree, considered such practical experience invaluable. When he returned from the battlefield, he proceeded to Leiden, where he attended classes given by Bernhard Albinus, Govert Bidloo and Herman Boerhaave. His doctoral dissertation was a study of the eye titled De tunica chorioidea. Ruysch hoped that Heister would eventually settle in Amsterdam. In fact, Heister was planning to do just that, but after another season on the battlefields of the Southern Netherlands, he decided instead to accept the position of professor of anatomy at the University of Altdorf (near Nuremberg). There he gained prominence as a learned physician with as much practical experience as Rau. In 1720 he took up a new professorial chair in Helmstedt, and in his acceptance speech he named Ruysch as the scientist who had made the biggest contribution to anatomical knowledge in the past twenty years. By now Ruysch was so old that he consented to ‘assistance’ in his educational duties, that is to say, he allowed a promising young physician to take over part of his teaching. Because the apprentice-surgeons had increasingly stayed away from his classes, in 1720 he began to leave those lessons to Jan Sermes, a brilliant young man of whom it was said that ‘in the fields of anatomy and surgery, his likes are seldom seen in the course of an entire century’.3 Jan Sermes’s teaching method was effective: he ordered his pupils to write down what he said and to study their notes before the next lesson, at the beginning of which he examined a few pupils at random before continuing with the material. ‘Thus they were forced to revise’, explained Titsingh, who was full of admiration for this teaching method.4

3 4

Titsingh, Diana, 164. Titsingh, Verdonkerde heelkonst, 781.

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Fig. 47 Portraits of Lorenz Heister and Hendrik Ulhoorn on the title page of Ulhoorn’s edition of Heister’s Heelkundige onderwijzingen, by Pieter Tanjé, 1739 (Iconographic Bureau).

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Jan Sermes was a son of the Amsterdam physician Gerard Sermes, a contemporary of Ruysch. As a young man Sermes first became apprenticed in Amsterdam to the surgeon Gerrit Borst, after which he went to Leiden to study medicine. After receiving his doctorate in 1710, he had been given permission by the Amsterdam town council to perform autopsies at the hospital, having told the burgomasters that he had specialized in anatomy at the urging of his professors and at the particular insistence of Ruysch. He pointed out that very few physicians specialized in anatomy, even though the subject was vital to the disciplines of medicine and surgery.5 The burgomasters had consulted Ruysch, and with his consent they had given Sermes permission to dissect bodies to further his own research and to instruct others. In 1714 he travelled to Paris, where he met the famous Joseph-Guichard Duverney, with whom Hendrik Ulhoorn was studying at the time. Sermes showed Duverney the muscles of the uvula and throat in a new-born baby, and the two men discussed new anatomical discoveries as though they were colleagues.6 Duverney was full of praise for the young Dutchman. Back in Amsterdam, in October 1714, Sermes performed his first lithotomy, which was a success. Jan Sermes was fascinated by many aspects of anatomy. Whenever an unusual case presented itself he went to have a look, merely out of curiosity, frequently accompanied by Adriaan Verduijn (the son of Pieter Adriaansz), who had also spent time abroad. Once, when Sermes was demonstrating surgical techniques on a corpse, one of those present told him that in the tsar’s army he had seen inguinal hernia operations that did not entail the removal of a testicle, and that all the patients had recovered. Sermes examined on the spot the feasibility of such an operation and later devoted a publication to it.7 In 1715 Sermes was appointed surgeon to the Reformed parish, which provided care for a large number of paupers. He had hoped in this way to gain experience as a stone-cutter, but there had been less call for his expertise than expected. In 1717 he performed only three operations, two of which were successful. In 1718 he performed a single operation and in 1719 three, all with favourable outcomes. In 1720 he was permitted to teach anatomy to the apprentice-surgeons and 5

Amsterdam City Archives, hospital archive 1060. Titsingh, Verdonkerde heelkonst, 792. 7 Sermes, Korte Verhandeling van een nieuwe manier van breuksnijden, in Lithotomia Douglasiana, 203–216. 6

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was also given a temporary appointment as municipal stone-cutter, even though the position had already been promised to a physician by the name of De Famars. This had been the doing of the burgomaster Egidius van den Bempden, who apparently had no idea that experience and skill were prerequisites to the post. When De Famars (a relative of Van den Bempden) confessed that he was unfit for the job, he was told to find a suitable replacement. The position was offered to Sermes on the basis of his reputation. He accepted the offer, and his appointment was ratified by the burgomasters. In 1720 he successfully performed four lithotomies before operating in September on a patient who died. Sermes was dissatisfied with the technique of stone-cutting, however much it had been improved by Frère Jacques and Johann Rau. The classical method of operating via the perineum had the drawback, more often than not, of leaving the patient incontinent and even infertile. Incontinence was the result of stretching the bladder’s sphincter muscle, caused by making the incision in the urethra, so that all the instruments and the stone as well had to pass through the sphincter. Frère Jacques and Johann Rau had bypassed the sphincter, but their technique required a knife to be plunged deep into the abdomen, making it vital to operate with the utmost care, as Sermes explained: ‘While previously one saw the cutting-staff [a grooved iron rod, or probe] bulging through the skin of the perineum, and geared the incision to the position of the groove, now the point of the knife must search for the cutting-staff, and the groove of the cutting-staff must come to meet the knife.’ The main thing was to avoid damage to the rectum. The surgeon had to ensure—with his finger, stuck in the ‘foundation’— that the cutting-staff ran alongside the rectum. The advantage of Rau’s method was that the surgeon could enter the bladder directly and search for the stone more freely. Forceps could be wielded more easily this way than when they were stuck tightly into the sphincter below the pubic bone. The wider opening also meant that larger stones could be removed. Yet anatomical research had made it clear to Sermes that Rau’s manner of operation was unsuitable for women: ‘I, at least, have never been able to perform this operation on dead women without injuring the vagina.’8

8

Sermes, Lithotomia Douglasiana, 3–5, 182.

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In 1719 Sermes heard that another method of stone-cutting was being tried out in England, and in 1720 Ruysch gave him a treatise on the subject—Lithotomia Douglasiana—recently published in London by the lithotomist John Douglas, who described a method whereby the surgeon did not operate via the perineum, but made the incision above the pubic bone, in the lower abdominal wall, on the front of the body. After using a catheter to fill the bladder with lukewarm water, the surgeon took a small knife and made an incision in the bladder—through skin, fat and abdominal muscles—and pulled out the stone with his fingers or with forceps. The method was called the sectio alta, and the operation was said to have been performed successfully three or four times. Douglas, a kindred spirit of Ruysch, held that ‘anatomy must be learned not from books, but from corpses, not from philosophers’ theses, but from the edifice of nature’.9 He warned of the reaction of the established order, since demonstrations of his method usually met with ridicule. Only William Cheselden, a surgeon at St Thomas’ Hospital in London, had adopted the new method. Douglas pointed out that new discoveries often seemed preposterous. This had been true, for example, of Harvey’s theory of circulation, but research and experience had eventually ensured acceptance of the idea, however much it ran counter to previous assumptions. Douglas avoided the disadvantages of both the classical method and that of Rau, but his technique was potentially damaging to the peritoneum. Sermes was aware of this, but he also saw the benefits of Douglas’s method. He carried out anatomical research to substantiate the method, and then resolved to master the sectio alta himself. Having devised his own variant, which made it unnecessary to fill the bladder with water, he practised several times on corpses, but longed for an opportunity to perform the operation on a living person. In 1722 he performed two lithotomies in his usual way, but both patients died. In one case the autopsy revealed that the stone was stuck in such a way that any attempt to remove it was doomed to fail. Even so, in 1723 Sermes thought it high time to try out his new technique. During that operation, on a child, he accidentally perforated the peritoneum, which was exactly what he was trying to avoid. He afterwards described the fateful operation: ‘My finger ended up in the abdominal cavity and I discovered that I had pierced the bladder. Stricken with dismay, I

9

Sermes, Lithotomia Douglasiana, 42.

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pulled my finger out, saw the intestines—through a hole the size of a hazelnut—pushing against the wound, and gave up the operation.’ The child died three days later. News spread fast, as Sermes related: ‘It was trumpeted all over the place, as though I were a murderer of innocent wretches.’ He was accused of sacrificing lives to his ‘rabid curiosity’.10 Sermes afterwards determined what he had done wrong and thought up a way to improve the technique, but he had lost all credit and his reputation was destroyed. The surgeons’ guild and the Collegium Medicum blamed him for taking unwarranted risks, and did everything they could to make life difficult for him—to begin with, by dismissing him from his teaching position. In Augustus 1723, Ruysch’s next protégé requested ‘permission to anatomize privately and also for the common good at both the hospital and the theatrum anatomicum of this city’.11 The petitioner was Arent Cant, the young physician who could draw as well as dissect; indeed, some of his anatomical illustrations had already been published. Ruysch and the Collegium Medicum approved his request, and the burgomasters followed suit, but no sooner had they done so than Cant succumbed to a fever and died. The next person to present himself as a champion of surgical teaching was Hendrik Ulhoorn. He was a surgeon, not a physician with an academic background, but he did not consider this a drawback. In his petition to the town council, he observed that anatomy and surgery were practised at a very high level in Paris, but to attain that level in Amsterdam it would be necessary ‘to employ a practising surgeon to assist Professor Ruysch . . . because of the great breadth of disciplines necessary to the art of surgery’. Teaching surgery was not the work of a doctor of medicine, but of a practising surgeon, one who was also an anatomist and a theorist. Ulhoorn, who thought he met these qualifications, declared his candidacy. On 22 March 1724 his request was put to the members of the Collegium Medicum, who in turn advised the town council.12 The Collegium Medicum, acting as though Ulhoorn’s proposal was an attempt to disqualify Ruysch, said that Ulhoorn’s broad view of the profession was already an integral part of Ruysch’s responsibilities, and remarked that Ulhoorn evidently thought Ruysch

10 11 12

Sermes, Lithotomia Douglasiana, 5, 198. Amsterdam City Archives, surgeons’ guild archive 228, 23 August 1723. Amsterdam City Archives, Collegium Medicum archive 3, 28 March 1724.

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incapable of fulfilling them. According to the Collegium Medicum, it was immaterial whether the instructor was a physician or a surgeon: only a doctor with both practical and theoretical knowledge of anatomy and surgery would ever be appointed to the position, and the same held true for a surgeon, ‘even the most prominent surgeon in Paris’. The need for both academic training and practical experience explains why this teaching post had traditionally been given only to doctors of medicine who were experienced medical practitioners. But despite the current availability of theoretically schooled surgeons, the Collegium Medicum, reluctant to create confusion, saw no reason to reapportion the teaching duties along the lines proposed by Ulhoorn. They declared that Professor Ruysch ‘had not complained of inability or incompetence’, and referred to his appearance in December, only four months previously, when he had last given a series of anatomical demonstrations on the body of an executed criminal. Ulhoorn, by contrast, had not yet proven his ability, and the Collegium Medicum therefore refused to recommend him for the position. Broken Hip After the death of Isaac Newton, the Académie des Sciences in Paris decided to honour Ruysch by appointing him to Newton’s place. Upon hearing the news, Ruysch wrote to the Académie: ‘I was truly stunned to read that I had been elected to membership in Your Society, and in the place of the great Newton at that!’ The honourable appointment inspired him to complete the inventory of the second cabinet of preparations in his new collection, so that he could dedicate the publication to the Académie. In the preface, dated 20 July 1728, he thanked the Académie for his appointment: ‘Oh, how much I should like, despite the brief time left to me in this life, to contribute to the advancement of science’, sighed the ninety-year-old Ruysch, ‘if only I had the strength.’ But he had to admit that his strength was failing him, particularly since a recent fall had left him feeling ‘worn out and spent’. That year Ruysch had stumbled over a foot-stove.13 It was not immediately clear whether he had broken his thigh, because breaks in

13

Schreiber, Verhaal van ’t leven ende verdiensten van Frederik Ruysch, 102.

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the neck of the thigh bone could not be verified by palpation. Ruysch knew all about this, because his writings on the subject had caused a commotion. Gerrit Borst, surgeon of the Old Women’s House run by the Reformed Congregation of Amsterdam, had discovered that lame patients who were suspected of having a dislocated hip usually had a broken femur instead. After making eight such diagnoses, he had passed this information on to Ruysch, who published an article in which he concluded that when the upper part of the os femoris had broken off, it could not grow back again, certainly not in the elderly, who often suffered such breaks owing to the fragility of their bones. When Duverney claimed in letters to Boerhaave that he had been the first to observe this, Ruysch insisted that Gerrit Borst had actually made the discovery. Ruysch knew how Duverney gathered his knowledge: ‘The French, especially the surgeons, have their correspondents here . . . The last one I knew was Dr P. Regis’, Ruysch supposedly told Titsingh. (He was referring to Pierre Régis, a Protestant who, after the repeal of the Edict of Nantes, had left France and settled in Amsterdam, where he published a number of Malpighi’s treatises.) ‘They hear everything and communicate it by letter . . . Thus Mr Duverney claims to have made the discovery, and will possibly have come by it just as Mr Vieussens came by the cerebral cortex.’14 Despite the wise lessons that Ruysch had devoted to the subject, the surgeons summoned to his bedside long debated whether or not his thighbone was broken. Some of them thought it was only a contusion, and this made Ruysch himself doubt whether it was broken. They continued to examine him, to the annoyance of Titsingh, who was convinced that the bone was fractured: ‘I found it so exasperating to see that honourable old man treated so disrespectfully time and again that I said to him: Dear Sir! Of what use is all this distressing curiosity? I must confront you with your own words . . . brothers! Stop quarrelling, for even if we could determine whether this injury was caused by twisting, bruising or fracture, what is to be gained by it?’ In this case, knowledge of the exact cause and nature of the injury had no bearing on the treatment. Titsingh had heard Ruysch himself say it: ‘Put on an oiled but adhesive chamois, and gird the thigh with a wide band. Make patients lie down and stay as still as possible for two months, after which they may get up on two crutches and learn to walk again,

14 AW (Frederik Ruysch, Alle de Werken) 770, 806; Titsingh, Verdonkerde heelkonst, 792–793. On Régis, see Cavazza, Editorial Fortune, 176–177.

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as well as they are able.’ Ruysch had to admit that Titsingh was right. It soon became clear that the upper part of his femur was broken, since that leg remained shorter and crooked. Ruysch nevertheless succeeded in getting back on his feet again, and could eventually walk on flat surfaces with crutches.15 He never recovered completely, however, and sometimes had to be carried in a sedan. Seated on a chair, Ruysch finished giving his botany course at the Hortus. Schreiber, who had meanwhile received his doctorate and planned to return to Germany, witnessed Ruysch’s demonstration of the sea cucumber. Without officially resigning or having his salary discontinued, Ruysch concluded his course, devoting the last lesson to ‘sweet-smelling marjoram’.16 The much younger Boerhaave followed his example and also went into retirement. Having been plagued for several years by serious pain in his joints, he had decided to retire as a lecturer. The following spring he had a student deliver a letter to Ruysch. ‘My dearest friend,’ Boerhaave wrote, ‘thank you for the congenial letter! I see in astonishment the youthful flashes of insight and the liveliness shining through them, which show that sweet thoughts still gladden your wise old age. At my request I have now received from my good masters my full discharge from botany and chemistry . . . and shall now publicly step down from those offices with a farewell speech . . . I am swamped with work and haven’t a moment of freedom; if I did, I should ride over and embrace you, from whom I have learned so much. The bearer of this letter is a highly educated young Swiss gentleman by the name of Gesnerus, a descendant of the great Conradus Gesnerus. Let him hear about and see your treasures: he deserves it . . . Farewell, my good fellow. Remember your dear friend & servant Hboerhaave.’ In his farewell speech Boerhaave thanked Ruysch for his contributions to the Leiden Hortus, where a plant had been named after him several years earlier: the dracocephalum Ruyschiana. (For a plant that did not fit into the existing taxonomy, Boerhaave had invented the genus Ruyschiana.)17 In July 1729 twenty-five-year-old Arie Bakker suffered an injury to an artery in his arm while being bled. In great pain, he was conveyed to Adriaan Verduijn, who took him to several other doctors and

15 16 17

Titsingh, Verdonkerde heelkonst, 700–701. Schreiber, Leven, 103. Chomel, Huishoudelijk Woordenboek V, 3141.

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surgeons. It was finally decided to ‘block’ the injured artery by ligature. The patient was warned of the dangers and the likelihood of amputation. A letter was written to request his mother’s consent. In the meantime, the patient had consulted Titsingh, who had been recommended to him. On the evening of 18 July, Titsingh and a colleague dressed the patient’s wound before taking him to see Ruysch, who strongly advised against operating and said that attempts should be made to save the arm by applying pressure. He cited various examples of arterial injuries that had healed. Titsingh seized upon this advice as a reason to avoid the dangerous operation, and when the patient was told that he might recover without it, he immediately consented to its postponement. Adriaan Verduijn, who was subsequently informed of their decision not to operate, went to Titsingh that same evening to reproach him for his ignorance and to say that the professor was out of his mind. The treatment proceeded in accordance with Ruysch’s wishes, but early one morning a week later the patient suffered arterial bleeding. In panic, Titsingh sent a messenger to ask advice of Ruysch, who said: ‘Close it off and do what you can until assistance arrives.’ Titsingh bandaged the hole and held it closed with both of his thumbs and one of the patient’s. In the meantime, someone was sent to fetch Adriaan Verduijn, Pieter Plaatman and Hendrik Ulhoorn. Verduijn refused to come because of Titsingh’s ‘extravagant misbehaviour’. So did Ulhoorn, but the messenger’s ‘fretful beseeching and moaning’ made him relent, even though he knew he would be blamed if the operation failed. When Ulhoorn arrived in Leliestraat early that morning, he found Titsingh and his patient in a serious predicament: ‘Surgeon and patient alike were the very picture of death, one through losing so much blood, the other because it was his fault.’ While questioning Titsingh it became clear to Ulhoorn that Arie Bakker’s life could be saved only by amputating his arm. He proceeded to do so, but Titsingh, acting as his assistant, was so nervous he could barely hand him the instruments. The ‘maladroit’ Titsingh even managed to wound Ulhoorn’s finger while handing him the saw. The operation was successful nonetheless, and surprisingly enough, the patient recovered, but the case damaged Titsingh’s reputation and cast doubt on the value of Ruysch’s advice.18

18

Titsingh, Verdonkerde heelkonst, 349–353; Ulhoorn, Tweede vertoog, 292–298.

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Ruysch, now too weak to engage in anatomical research, conceived a plan to write a treatise on illness and ageing. Writing about ‘how the human body slowly changes over the years’ would require no research, since he himself was experiencing these changes. There were many unpleasant things about growing old, but Ruysch thought it a blessing of nature that he now had only one ‘evacuation’ a week.19 In the summer of 1730 he wrote about this to Philippe Hecquet—in Dutch, because he lacked the energy to write in Latin or French: ‘Dear Sir and Friend, When I think about how we human beings change in essence over time, especially if we have not seen one another for a long time, then one sometimes quantum mutatus ab illo. I then resolved, with the Lord’s blessing, diligently to present this case, in which I was so successful and fortunate that I am now amazed to be able to say—at the advanced age of ninety-two, after around seventy years of examining the human body—volens nolens something I never knew before, namely quid sit de antro magni Highmori.’ (Ruysch had been studying the cavity in the upper jaw, the antrum Highmori, named after the English anatomist Nathaniel Highmore.) He expanded upon this somewhat, but then returned to his main subject, saying ‘that not only do great changes occur over time in the outward appearance of human beings, but in very old age a number of princely parts disappear without taking leave.’ He had discovered, for instance, that the sperm-producing vessels change into cartilage. He was delighted to make such discoveries at his age. ‘O sweet and insufficiently praised grace of God, to which all honour is due! . . . PS dear sir, should you have the time and inclination to answer this, keep it short and sermone Latino, because I find the French language difficult.’20 Frederik Ruysch had always had a remarkably strong constitution, having suffered perhaps no more than thirty days of illness in his entire life, but in the last months of 1730 it became clear that his end was approaching. In November a document was drawn up bequeathing the six family portraits to the three surviving children: Rachel, Anna and Elisabeth. The most important part of Ruysch’s estate, his collection, had not yet been sold, and because he could no longer arrange this personally, at the end of the year he authorized his two oldest sonsin-law, Jurriaan Pool and Isaac Hellenbroek, to sell ‘all crates, boxes,

19 20

Schreiber, Leven, 102. Amsterdam University Library, Ruysch to Hecquet, 22 June 1730.

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bottles, injection instruments, ornaments, several bottles of insects, animals and so on’. Part of the collection was described in the two catalogues Ruysch had published; the rest was listed in a handwritten inventory. Ruysch was hoping to sell the collection for at least 22,000 guilders to the British Crown or the Royal Society. His sonsin-law authorized an English physician, Imanuel Mussapha—who had recently finished his studies in Leiden and had already set up a medical practice in London—to sell the collection and the herbaria in England. Mussapha, who was in Amsterdam at the time, was the last person to write in Frederik Ruysch’s guestbook.21 The Estate Frederik Ruysch died on 22 February 1731 in his house on the Bloemgracht. He was ninety-two. Jurriaan Pool and Isaac Hellenbroek acted as joint executors of his estate. On 27 February, Ruysch was laid to rest in a grave in the Nieuwe Kerk (New Church). One week later, on 6 March, officials began to draw up the inventory of his estate, starting in the attic and continuing on the upper floor, where the tablecloths embroidered with a rose were kept in one of the front rooms. Working through the house from top to bottom, they recorded the contents of each room. In one of the back rooms they found ‘some rarities & items of surgical interest’ and two bookcases. The house contained altogether 187 folio volumes, 160 books in quarto, 300 smaller volumes and several parcels of unbound books. A cabinet of anatomical rarities stood in the entrance hall. The main hall (whose windows had white lace curtains) contained a wardrobe, a sofa, a barometer and eighteen paintings. The large central room, decorated with silk wallpaper, boasted the six family portraits (bequeathed to the surviving daughters) among the seventeen paintings adorning the walls. In addition to a dining table, twelve chairs, a large mirror in a gilded frame, a grandfather clock in a walnut case and a cupid, the ‘large room’ housed the eight cabinets of ‘anatomical rarities’. There was also a wooden tomb, and dried flowers behind glass in three picture frames.

21 Amsterdam City Archives, notarial archive 7649, notary Abraham Tzeewen, act 981, 28 December 1730; Amsterdam University Library, MS I E 21, 28 December 1730.

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The ‘large room’ functioned as a reception area, while the ‘dining room’, which served as a living room, contained a fitted cabinet with porcelain and silverware, a cabinet full of copper and pewter dinnerware, three inkwells, a funnel, a square mirror with a glass frame, a couch, foot-stoves, buffet tables and a fireplace. There was another room, possibly Elisabeth’s, which contained several paintings, including ‘two glass frames with flower paintings & animals’. Medals, jewellery and share certificates were kept in an iron strongbox in the office. Among Frederik Ruysch’s possessions was a golden medallion from the King of Poland, a gold medal featuring the naval hero Maarten Tromp (probably made by Jurriaan Pool’s father), and a gold coin and a medallion from the King of England (presumably tokens of gratitude for embalming the body of Admiral Berkeley). There were silver coins worth 2,804 guilders and gold coins worth 1,792 guilders. Ruysch owned shares worth 29,000 guilders, approximately the amount he had received for his first collection. Of this amount, 27,800 guilders were invested in bonds issued by the province of Holland and 1,200 guilders in bonds issued by the United Provinces (the Generality). He owed 4,250 guilders to his son-in-law Jan Heijn, the husband of his deceased daughter Maria Jacoba. Ruysch had never paid interest on this debt. According to the inventory, Ruysch owned, in addition to his house on the Bloemgracht, the house next door, which was occupied by Gerrit Opperloo. It took a week to draw up the inventory, which was signed in the presence of the notary Abraham Tzeeuwen.22 The collection of anatomical and botanical specimens accounted for approximately one-third of the total value of Ruysch’s estate. His heirs did not intend to keep the collection, so they placed an advertisement announcing its sale in the Amsterdamsche Courant of 10 April. Meanwhile Herman Boerhaave had been doing his best to get a royal court or scientific institution to buy the collection. On 19 April he wrote to the learned physician Johann Baptista Bassand (personal physician to the emperor in Vienna), telling him that he had lost his dearest friend, Frederik Ruysch, whose memory he would cherish forever. Ruysch had left a complete anatomical museum and cabinet of naturalia. It was now for sale, and Boerhaave said he very much hoped

22 Amsterdam City Archives, notarial archive 7650, notary Abraham Tzeeuwen, act 169, 13 March 1731.

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it would remain intact in the possession of some royal personage or other distinguished collector. The King of Poland had shown a brief interest in it, but he had other collecting priorities.23 In early March, Boerhaave had written to the botanist Philip Miller, chief gardener and superintendent of the Chelsea Physick Garden of the London Society of Apothecaries: ‘Here the prince of all anatomists, Frederik Ruysch, has died at the age of ninety-three. The anatomical cabinet he assembled, together with his son, has remained intact with his heirs; it is impossible to find its equal in all of Europe.’ Boerhaave said that he feared the collection would end up in Poland or Russia. If the latter, it would augment the collection in St Petersburg. He would prefer it to go to England or France, but it was necessary to act quickly to bring this about.24 Having had no reply from Sloane, Boerhaave wrote to him again in May to tell him that Ruysch’s collection of anatomical treasures was being sold by his heirs. Its like had never been seen before, nor was such a collection likely to be formed again in the near future. It was the result of sixty-nine years of work by a highly skilled artist, who had prepared every part of the body in such a way as to reveal the most subtle details. The collection would attract a great many visitors, but could also be used for research and education. Boerhaave asked Sloane to consider purchasing the collection and donating it to the state. It would be an enduring investment, because instructions for conserving the preparations were to be part of the deal.25 Sloane did not respond to the offer. Despite Herman Boerhaave’s best efforts, no buyer could be found. It was decided to auction off the estate, and to allow bidding on individual parts of it. The sale catalogue of the anatomical preparations was printed in both Latin and Dutch.26 On 2 August it was announced in the Amsterdamsche Courant that the auction would take place on 15 August, at the house with the rose on the Bloemgracht, under the direction of the agents Gerrit Schoemaker,

23

Lindeboom, Boerhaave’s brieven aan Bassand (Haarlem, 1957), 192. Corr. Boerhaave III, 140. 25 Corr. Boerhaave I, 195. Sloane already owned a collection of Ruysch’s preparations. When Sauveur Morand described Sloane’s collection in 1729, he said that it filled eleven large rooms. In his view, the most extraordinary part consisted of the rare anatomical specimens, including a number prepared by Ruysch (MacGregor, Sir Hans Sloane, 31). 26 Catalogus van wereltberoemde anatomische voorwerpen and Catalogus musaei Ruyschiani. 24

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Vincent Posthumus and Frederik Ruysch Pool, Ruysch’s eldest grandson.27 The sale included eight cabinets of preparations, a large number of crates and boxes, and twenty-seven herbaria. The paintings (by such artists as Willem van Aelst, Jan Davidsz de Heem and Jan Steen) were sold separately two months later.28 The heirs had close ties to the agents. Isaac Ruysch Pool, the younger brother of Frederik Ruysch Pool, was a brother-in-law of Gerrit Schoemaker. Like his father, Isaac had become a cloth merchant, and Gerrit Schoemaker was the son of the cloth merchant Andries Schoemaker, who for years had lived around the corner from Frederik Ruysch. Father and son Schoemaker were enthusiastic collectors of coins, medals, drawings and old manuscripts. Among their friends were several versifiers, including Ludolf Smids, Claas Bruin and Pieter Langendijk. While the brokers disposed of Ruysch’s material goods, the poets ensured that his name would live on. Claas Bruin wrote a verse To the pious demise of the learned gentleman Frederik Ruysch: For heroes on both land and sea, though bad behaviour mar their image, We erect great burial vaults, expending blood and tears aplenty, Their manly courage to exalt, and pave the way to fame and glory, What column, then, would not be raised! What tomb of everlasting marble Not be built, to shine and blaze for Ruysch, courageous guardian angel Of the sick! The stay and comfort of the blind, the deaf, the injured.

Many of the specimens on offer were eventually sold to Friedrich August, Elector of Saxony and King of Poland, who had been given the right of first refusal. He paid 20,000 guilders for the collection, which was installed at the court in Dresden. The new owner soon died, however, on 1 February 1733, and the following years saw various contenders for the Polish throne. The next king was ousted by a Russian army, and just as Friedrich August had acceded to the throne with the support of Tsar Peter, his son now became his designated successor. Friedrich August II donated Ruysch’s collection to the University of Wittenberg, whose professor of anatomy—Abraham Vater, a former pupil of Ruysch—published the collection catalogue.29

27

See De wereld binnen handbereik, 117. Amsterdamsche Courant, 25 September 1731. 29 Regii Musei Anat. August. Catalogus Universalis (Wittenberg, 1736). Vater also had some of Ruysch’s preparations in his collection, the catalogue of which was published in Helmstedt in 1750: Museum anatomicum proprium, with a foreword by Lorenz Heister. 28

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The collection ended up with the collector Adrianus Deknatel, an apothecary who collected unusual animals and shells, some of which had come from Albert Seba’s collection. However, when Deknatel’s collection was sold in 1765, it was mainly Ruysch’s preparations that served to recommend it. These included a three-month foetus ‘with its amniotic membrane and umbilical cord’, ‘a very fine baby of a Negress’, with ornaments and ‘a human brain . . . very nicely injected with a red substance’.30 Tradition versus Enlightenment: Titsingh and Ulhoorn The death of Frederik Ruysch prompted several commemorative outpourings. Such celebrated poets as Claas Bruin and Sybrand Feitama composed verses and an epitaph for Ruysch.31 His body was ‘dissected in the grave, decayed into vapour and dust’, in the words of Bruin, whose own body soon suffered the same fate. Sybrand Feitama (who had previously sung the praises of Maria Sibylla Merian) composed a Mausoleum for Professor Frederik Ruysch, in which he called Ruysch the ‘Dutch Aesclepius’. Feitama had also written a verse ‘on the likenesses of Miss Rachel Ruysch and Mr Juriaan Pool, artfully painted by himself’.32 Rachel Ruysch had meanwhile become so famous that she was the subject of many poems, which invariably mentioned her worthy father. When Arnold Hoogvliet wrote a poem in praise of her, he told her that he was intending with hymns of praise sincerely meant, to hang your brushes, great in fame, beside your father’s well-known name, high in the shining firmament.

In a poem ‘to the outstanding flower and fruit paintings of Miss Rachel Ruysch’, Rachel was described as the eldest descendant of Ruysch, who had ‘most perfectly elevated anatomy to the throne of honour’. Another poem to Rachel also alluded to ‘Holland’s Aesclepius, the great Ruysch’.

30 31 32

Catalogus Deknatel. Bruin, Verzameling III, 384, 404. Feitama, Nagelaten dichtwerken.

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Bram Titsingh had often praised Ruysch, but the first piece of writing he published after the anatomist’s death represented yet another ode to his achievements. Titsingh quoted Boerhaave, who had said of Ruysch that he ‘has given mathematics to medicine, and from death’s scent brought the moribund to life again’. To his regret, the Amsterdam surgical profession would now have to do without Ruysch, ‘to whose brilliant discoveries the field of medicine is more indebted than to all other anatomical writers; he is, or rather was, a pearl in the crown of the city of Amsterdam, which neither time nor envy can steal. Indeed, he was a great man!’33 When Frederik Ruysch was born, the theory of blood circulation was still disputed. He lived through a heroic period, in which many discoveries were made and many new insights developed. By the time he died, the Enlightenment had dawned. Among Amsterdam surgeons, the spirit of enlightenment was personified by Hendrik Ulhoorn, who clearly saw Ruysch as the embodiment of a generation that had clung too tightly to traditional views. Ulhoorn recognized the contributions of the previous generation, but thought that times had changed and that rational insights should replace traditional ideas. This caused him to clash with Titsingh, one bone of contention being Ruysch’s significance to the surgical profession in Amsterdam. Ulhoorn claimed that he knew Ruysch’s capacities better than Titsingh did: ‘No one will speak of the excellent, late Ruysch other than to say with praise that he was a worthy and diligent, even tireless searcher and discoverer of the human constitution, and even though that hero rose to such importance from the apothecary shop, centuries from now people will extol the glory of this unflagging wrestler by exclaiming: who before or after you will work with such assiduousness! He was the solver of many useful mysteries, on which matters he concentrated with such diligence that the day, which started early for him, was always too short. But tell me, how well did that hero of anatomy teach, and how well-read and erudite was he?’ Ulhoorn could not help but conclude that in Ruysch’s day no serious course of surgical training had been instituted in Amsterdam. Ruysch had been the professor, to be sure, but not a proper one. He had not taught at the Athenaeum; instead, he had been the guild’s praelector, responsible for teaching anatomy to the surgeons.

33

Titsingh, Splijtinge, 93, 149.

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But Ruysch’s contemporaries included other lecturers—such as Rau, Sermes and Cant—who might have been able to provide the surgeons with an excellent education. Rau, for example, was a better teacher than Ruysch, but Ruysch had not permitted others to coexist alongside him. Ulhoorn knew from experience that Ruysch was afraid of ‘being eclipsed, which is why, in my time, the old man had not three helpers but twelve, each sent home in turn when he had been around long enough. Dr J. Sermes sometimes gave public demonstrations with the old man’s permission, but A. Cant had no opportunity to do so, since that young hero in the knowledge and practice of anatomy was prematurely snatched from his potential audience.’ But the threesome Rau, Sermes and Cant were certainly as capable of teaching as Ruysch, whom Titsingh praised to the skies. In contrast, Ulhoorn maintained that ‘everyone will agree with me that to be learned, to possess the knack of dissection and surgery, and to teach well must be regarded as three separate talents’. It was highly unusual for a person to be endowed with all three, and Ruysch was not an example of such a rare creature. Ruysch was a distinguished researcher, but this did not mean that he also excelled in ‘public practice or learned instruction; no, in those he was weak’. He was unsystematic, Ulhoorn said, and did not teach in a way suited to young apprentice-surgeons: ‘I do not speak of this presumptuously, and certainly not with contempt, because he simply did not have the necessary aptitude.’ Ulhoorn explained that Ruysch, despite his ‘fortunate talents’, was lacking something, ‘which he never failed to acknowledge himself’. But he hastened to add that Ruysch ‘was charitable, zealous in working for the common good, faithful in word and deed, fervent in his study of useful new discoveries, no scandalmonger or slanderer, and at the top of the list of his virtues—and I cannot possibly name them all—the greatest was to serve God as long as there was breath in him’.34 Biography In contrast to Titsingh, who had almost nothing but praise for Ruysch, Ulhoorn gave a realistic evaluation of Ruysch’s significance to the surgical profession in Amsterdam: he was neither an expert in surgical

34

Ulhoorn, Tweede vertoog, 354–365.

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techniques nor a great lecturer, and he had left little room for others who were more competent surgeons or teachers. In voicing his criticism, however, Ulhoorn ignored the historical context: the problem was that Ruysch had worked within an outdated system that had originated in a distant past and was upheld by vested interests. It was strange, to say the least, that the apprentice-surgeons did not receive instruction from a surgeon, but when those lessons were started, it was assumed that the guild system assured surgeons of adequate professional training. For Ruysch those lessons were a source of income. He was, first and foremost, an anatomist, but that was not a paid position in itself. He taught in order to finance his dissecting, and he protected his position to safeguard his income. In doing so, he helped surgery to advance, but it was an elite group of surgeons who profited from his work, which focused on the science of anatomy rather than on surgical training. His merits in the scientific sphere were discussed in detail in a biography written shortly after his death: Historia vitae et meritorum Frederici Ruysch. The author, Johann Friedrich Schreiber, a young man of twenty-seven, had recently published in Leipzig his Fundamenta medicinae physico-mathematica. At the time he was living in Riga, but he had studied in Holland with Boerhaave and Ruysch, and he was grateful to Ruysch for the help he had given him. Schreiber declared that his first earnings as a medical practitioner had been due to Ruysch, who had arranged for him to work as a physician in Zaandam. For a scholar, Zaandam was ‘a truly bleak place’, but at least it was a start. Schreiber, a native of Königsberg, had returned to Prussia. He was a candidate for a professorship in Halle, but decided to obey the call to become a field doctor in the Russian army. (Afterwards he became a municipal physician in Moscow and professor of anatomy and surgery in St Petersburg.) When he heard that Ruysch had died, he resolved to write a piece about him, convinced as he was of the value of his anatomical work, which he considered vital to the advancement of medicine. ‘We would certainly lack the worthy teachings of Boerhaave, if there had not been that great artist, Ruysch, or someone like him’, Schreiber declared.35 In his opinion, Ruysch’s most important achievement was the development of his preparation technique, but he

35

Schreiber, Leven, 12.

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also deserved praise for his precise observations, which had brought about various discoveries. Schreiber’s piece was mainly an evaluation of Ruysch’s significance to medical science; the biographical passages were based on information received from Johann Christoph Bohle, who had been on intimate terms with Ruysch. Bohle (who became a professor at Königsberg and personal physician to the King of Prussia) told Schreiber that he had heard from Ruysch how much Van Horne had envied his anatomical skills. Schreiber added several personal experiences, describing, for instance, how the old Ruysch, when he could no longer walk, gave his lessons at the Hortus seated in a chair. Schreiber also recollected the delight he took in viewing the collection. ‘The very small skeletons, no bigger than the little finger, were truly works of outstanding anatomical art’, he said. Admittedly, they were slightly macabre, but their ivory colour made them beautiful to behold, and he had to admit that the memory of those images of death, lying on silk cushions in their coffins, still gave him a great deal of pleasure. Schreiber’s piece served as the basis of a commemorative article by Bernard le Bovier de Fontenelle, secretary of the Académie des Sciences. Ruysch had been a member of the Académie only briefly, of course, and Fontenelle had not known him personally, so Schreiber’s information proved useful. The biographies by Schreiber and Fontenelle served as the main sources for almost every author who subsequently wrote about Ruysch. One of those later authors borrowed elements from Fontenelle’s biography of Ruysch to create a novel. Eugène de Bully, whose writings appeared in the mid-nineteenth century under the pseudonym Roger de Beauvoir, had travelled through Belgium and the Netherlands, and in The Hague he had happened upon an old catalogue of Ruysch’s anatomical collection, which inspired him to write the novel Ruysch, histoire hollandaise du 17e siècle. His story begins on 18 March 1667, the day the naval hero Michiel de Ruyter brings his foster daughter Sarah to stay with his boyhood friend Frederik Ruysch, who lives in Amsterdam on the Kloveniersburgwal, almost directly opposite the anatomical theatre on the Nieuwmarkt, where he teaches. Ruysch lives with his daughter, the painter Rachel Ruysch. The plot thickens as Sarah becomes involved with a French adventurer who murders people in order to sell their bodies to anatomists. He deceives her, and when she finds out, she drowns herself in despair, whereupon her body is embalmed by Ruysch. In the course of the story it emerges that Ruysch has fathered

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the daughter of an English lady. Eventually reduced to poverty, he is forced to sell his collection. Rachel, his legitimate daughter, goes to Paris to sell her paintings. She earns enough money to save them both, thus allowing Frederik Ruysch to grow old respectably. At the age of ninety, he still gives lessons in the anatomical theatre, even though a broken thighbone means that his pupils have to carry him there. The biographical passages in ‘scientific’ articles were sometimes no less fictitious. In the same period, Joseph Hyrtl spread the story that Ruysch’s preparations had arrived in St Petersburg in a damaged state, because the sailors had consumed the alcohol in which they were preserved. Only towards the end of the nineteenth century were new facts published about Ruysch’s life.36 The Secret Frederik Ruysch had come very close to immortality: he was survived by several children, his likeness was handed down to posterity in several paintings, a body part had been named after him, his anatomical preparations had been preserved in St Petersburg, and his collected writings had been published. In 1737 his five-volume Opera omnia anatomica-medico-chirurgica was published in Amsterdam, followed in 1744 by a Dutch translation titled Alle de ontleed-, genees- en heelkundige werken (The complete anatomical, medical and surgical works), compiled and edited by the Amsterdam physician Ysbrant Gijsbert Arlebout. But Ruysch had taken the secret of his preparation technique with him to the grave—or so it seemed. In 1717, when his collection was sold to Tsar Peter the Great, Ruysch had supplied written instructions to a notary, who handed the document over to one of the tsar’s representatives after his client had been paid. But how much information did that document really contain? At the time, Duverney had tried to worm the secret out of Erskine, offering to send several of his own preparations in exchange for a couple of Ruysch’s specimens. He hoped that Erskine would tell him the secret, since they had always kept each other abreast of scientific developments. Erskine had not

36 These new facts appeared in a dissertation by Pieter Scheltema, published in 1886: Het leven van Frederik Ruijsch. Scheltema worked at the Amsterdam City Archives, the source of most of his information.

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responded to the offer, and since his death nothing more had been heard of Ruysch’s handwritten instructions. There was, however, a great deal of speculation about the method. Ruysch’s secrecy had already been criticized during his lifetime. The Englishman William Wagstaffe, for example, wrote: ‘dr. Ruysch has given us several excellent and curious drawings of the finest preparations in the world; but we had certainly been more obliged to him if he had communicated his observations on the manner of preparing them.’37 Bernard Siegfried Albinus—who, like Ruysch, had specialized in arterial injection—suggested to Albrecht Haller that Ruysch’s success had depended not so much on his secret formula as on his extraordinary skill. It was essential, he said, to soak the body parts for a long time and then to inject them carefully with a liquid substance that did not immediately solidify.38 In 1743, twelve years after Ruysch’s death, the secret was revealed by a physician named Johann Christoph Rieger, who lived above a bookshop in The Hague and was working on an ambitious encyclopaedia of natural history and medicine. (It was so detailed that it took Rieger two volumes to cover the first three letters of the alphabet.39) Rieger had headed the medical faculty in St Petersburg from 1732 to 1734, and it was in this capacity that he had apparently been able to study Ruysch’s handwritten document. Rieger now revealed the great anatomist’s method of preserving corpses. Ruysch recommended soaking the body for a day or two in cold water before cutting open the aorta and the vena cava and squeezing out the blood, after which the body was kept in warm water for four to six hours. The next step was to inject suet or tallow. In the summer a bit of white wax could be added, or else a mixture of wax, white spirit and resin. The injection fluid could be dyed with vermilion, but the larger vessels then had to be filled with wax to keep the vermilion from escaping. After injecting the dye, the body had to be moved back and forth in cold water to ensure that the vermilion did not precipitate but remained suspended and evenly distributed in the liquid until the mass solidified. The corpse, thus injected, had to be kept in diluted

37

In James Drake, Anthropologia Nova I, xi (London, 1728). Haller, Tagebücher, 45. Albinus, too, kept the composition of his injection fluid a secret. 39 J.C. Rieger, Introductio in Notitiam Rerum Naturalium et Artefactarum (The Hague, 1743), I, 580. 38

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alcohol. Ruysch supposedly distilled the alcohol himself from barley. It was advisable to add pepper, according to Rieger, so that the alcohol would permeate the muscles better. It was doubtful whether Ruysch’s instructions actually described his complete working method. No one ever succeeded in making preparations like Ruysch’s by following the instructions published by Rieger. A copy of the St Petersburg document had ended up in Paris, where attempts to reproduce Ruysch’s methods also proved futile. Apparently the instructions did not tell the whole story. Another way of unravelling the secret was to analyse the preparations. In Paris, Rouhault had tried to do this as early as 1718. After Ruysch’s death, further analysis was undertaken by Johann Nathanaël Lieberkühn, an anatomist who had studied with Boerhaave before going to Berlin to work for the King of Prussia. Lieberkühn was an expert who had succeeded in injecting extremely small vessels.40 He was fairly critical of Ruysch’s preparations: the injection fluid was too liquid to ensure lasting preservation, the dye had separated into its component parts, and the waxy substance had cracked. Lieberkühn himself made very good microscopes, which enabled him to see that Ruysch’s injection technique was not perfect, because it had not left the vessels intact. Lieberkühn found congealed lumps in the places where Ruysch’s substance had escaped from the vessels.41 In 1749, Louis Daubenton, curator of the Jardin des Plantes in Paris, revealed the nature of Ruysch’s preservation liquid. The formula had apparently been given to the Académie des Sciences shortly after Ruysch’s death. Everyone who had seen Ruysch’s wet preparations had made much of his liquor balsamicus, but Ruysch could never be persuaded to divulge its ingredients. After his death, when the formula was disclosed in Paris, the Académie charged the chemist ClaudeJoseph Geoffroy with the task of experimenting with the liquid, which was said to consist of spirit of wine (ethyl alcohol ) and a powder made of black pepper, cardamom seeds and cloves. A bag of camphor was suspended in this mixture and the whole was then distilled.42 Once

40 According to Haller (Geschichte, 61), he was ‘one of those anatomists who succeed best at depicting the vessels’. Haller himself published a piece on Ruysch’s method, drawing his information from Rieger’s article (Bibliotheca Anatomica I, 529, and II, 372). 41 Mémoires de l’Académie de Berlin, 1748. 42 Daubenton, Pieces d’anatomie conservées dans les liqueurs.

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again, the results were rather unimpressive. According to Daubenton, it made little difference which spices were dissolved in the liquid. The method of distillation was more important, and it was essential to add a certain amount of water. However, just as the revelation of the injection-fluid formula had failed to produce satisfying results, so too the disclosure of the composition of the liquor balsamicus. Ruysch himself had predicted as much, claiming in 1722 that his art was unique, and that even though his preparations were criticized as ‘unnatural’, he knew that people everywhere were trying to imitate him: ‘But it is easier to criticize than to imitate, as those who follow after me will see when I am dead.’43 Although arterial injection long remained an important anatomical technique, after Ruysch no significant advances were made. Various substances were tested and numerous variants tried out, but the technique was refined only through the improvement of microscopes, which, among other things, enabled Lieberkühn and Albinus to make very delicate preparations. Microscopic examination led Albinus to contest Ruysch’s conclusion that tissue was composed entirely of blood vessels, just as it led to the eventual abandonment of his idea that bodily fluids were processed in the extreme ends of the vessels. Ruysch’s version of things was accepted by many scientists on the basis of his preparations and the weight of Herman Boerhaave’s authority, but a century later the glands were completely rehabilitated. At the end of the eighteenth century, the tunica Ruyschiana (the sclera named after Ruysch) was no longer considered an independent membrane.44 By then it had become clear that Ruysch’s method, however spectacular its results, was not infallible, and that—as Boerhaave had suggested—it actually had a distorting effect, which caused the glands and other tissues to disappear. Ruysch had complete faith in his technique, and was convinced that he had brought it to perfection, but technological advancement later demonstrated that the human body

43

AW 1215. Coxe: ‘He supposed that he had discovered a new membrane in the choroides of the eye, which is from him called Ruyschian. In order to ascertain this discovery, he spared neither pains nor expences; and although in the opinion of the most able anatomists he may not have succeeded in his attempts to prove the existence of this new membrane, yet his labours must be esteemed of great use, and his injections of the finer vessels of the eye are justly admired for their superior delicacy . . . He affirmed that he divided the choroides into two membranes, but it is now the received opinion that he only split the same membrane into two parts’ (Travels, III, 213–214). 44

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was infinitely more complicated than he ever imagined. The question that remains is the veracity of his other claim, namely that his preparations would prove imperishable. The Preparations in the Kunstkamera Herman Boerhaave, who survived Ruysch by no more than seven years, died childless in 1738. His designated heirs were the two sons of his sister Margaretha, who was married to the Hague physician Jacob Kaau. These nephews, who had both studied medicine, changed their names to Herman and Abraham Kaau Boerhaave. Like the name of Ruysch, the name of Boerhaave lived on as a construct. Herman soon found himself in great difficulty: plagued by creditors, he hastily abandoned his medical practice in The Hague, but was saved by Gerard van Swieten, a devoted pupil of his uncle, who secured him an appointment as court physician in St Petersburg.45 Van Swieten also recommended Abraham, who was deaf and therefore unfit for medical practice, though he could function perfectly well as curator of Ruysch’s collection. Thus both nephews ended up in St Petersburg, with Herman Boerhaave’s manuscripts in tow, and so the work of Ruysch and Boerhaave was posthumously united. When Abraham Kaau Boerhaave arrived in St Petersburg, Ruysch’s preparations in the Kunstkamera were in a room on the lower floor, just next to the anatomical theatre. The arrangement was no longer as it had been on the Bloemgracht; instead, the preparations were grouped systematically in cabinets devoted to a certain part of the body. Between the cabinets stood the skeletons, and placed in the middle of the room were the animals and shells from the collections of both Ruysch and Seba. The catalogue contained thirty-eight pages of descriptions of birds stuffed by Ruysch. His herbaria were installed in the gallery above the room of preparations. They had been arranged by the Amsterdam physician Johan Amman, who had been the keeper of Hans Sloane’s collection in London until 1733, when he was offered a professorship in botany in St Petersburg. Although the young Swedish botanist Karl von Linné (Linnaeus) had meanwhile published a new system, Amman had used Tournefort’s method to arrange Ruysch’s

45

See Van der Korst, Een dokter van formaat.

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herbaria. Amman, who was sceptical of the Linnaean system, wrote to Sloane from St Petersburg: ‘His botanical tables are in my opinion more curious than usefull, and I doubt very much if any botanist will follow his lewd method.’46 The wet preparations had been carefully conserved according to the instructions left by Ruysch, who had said in the preface to the catalogue of his ‘royal cabinet’ that the buyer would not have to refill the bottles and jars with preservation fluid for several years. When the specimens arrived in St Petersburg, however, Blumentrost immediately ordered 2,000 pigs’ bladders and 1,000 buckets of wine, in order to top up the jars. Careful conservation of the preparations was in the interest of both Ruysch and the Russians, which is why it had not been difficult to negotiate the sale of his secret formula. Ruysch had simply given the Russians instructions for conserving his collection, plus several general tips that would enable them to make preparations themselves. The collection in the Kunstkamera served as study material, particularly for the researchers at the Academy of Science and their pupils, but the Kunstkamera was also a public museum. Visitors could have themselves rowed from the city across the River Neva to Vassilevski Island to view Ruysch’s ingenious compositions, the biggest attraction being the group of preparations that demonstrated the growth of the embryo. On 5 December 1747 a fire broke out in the Kunstkamera. The flames spread rapidly, and from the rooms as yet untouched by the fire, objects were thrown outside into the snow. When the fire had been extinguished and the damage assessed, the zoological part of Ruysch’s collection appeared to have suffered, but the anatomical specimens had hardly been affected. During the subsequent restoration, the collection was housed elsewhere. By 1766, when it returned to the museum, times had changed: universal museums were no longer considered the scientific ideal, and the Kunstkamera’s collection was divided up among various specialized museums. Ruysch’s anatomical collection, however, returned to the Kunstkamera as an independent entity. In 1776 it was housed in the third room on the ground floor, filling eighteen glass cabinets displaying Ruysch’s own arrangement, so that optimal use could be made of his original descriptions.

46

Dandy, Sloane Herbarium, 82.

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In 1792, when the British historian William Coxe published a description of Russia, he mentioned the anatomical collection in St Petersburg: ‘The anatomical cabinet is highly esteemed from its having been prepared by Ruysch, a celebrated anatomist of The Hague, who sold it in 1717 to Peter the Great for 30,000 florins. This collection is particularly celebrated for the regular succession of foetuses in spirits, from the earliest period of conception to the birth of the infant, and for the injections of the brain and eye. The membranes of the eye are so fine and tender, that it requires infinite care to inject them; and Ruysch, of all others, succeeded best in this difficult operation.’ Coxe may well have had this information from his father, who had been the personal physician to the British royal family.47 In 1794 the surgeon Jesse Foot, who worked for a time in St Petersburg, reported that he had seen Ruysch’s preparations ‘going apace into decay’.48 But according to a history of Russian medicine published in Moscow in 1817, ‘the rarest and finest of preparations providing knowledge of the human body are still preserved in numerous glass cases’.49 The author of this medical history, the Russian physician Wilhelm Michael von Richter (son of a Lutheran minister in Moscow, who had studied in Western Europe), had the most praise for the head of a youth, from which the crown of the skull had been removed, exposing numerous extremely fine, carefully injected blood vessels in the pia mater. The boy’s vivid complexion and red lips had been perfectly preserved for more than a century, and according to Von Richter, visitors invariably viewed this preparation with ‘astonished admiration’. Nonetheless, what attracted the most attention were the preparations that illustrated the development of the human foetus. That collection—numbering 110 embryos and foetuses, from the size of a pea to a fully formed human being— was still unique. After this, little was heard of Ruysch’s collection, and in Western Europe it was long assumed that none of his preparations had survived. In the mid-nineteenth century, the Viennese anatomist Joseph Hyrtl declared: ‘Ruysch’s name has survived his collections.’ Of the preparations that Ruysch claimed would last for all eternity, nothing was left, according to Hyrtl, who condemned Ruysch’s technique,

47 48 49

Coxe, Travels into Poland, Russia III, 213. Jesse Foot, The Life of John Hunter (quoted in Cole, History 308). Richter, Geschichte der Medicin III, 27.

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saying that the tsar had spent 30,000 guilders on nothing but ‘red guts in watery spirits . . . This just goes to show that it would have been a miracle if even one of these preparations had survived until the present day.’50 His assertions were believed, and until the end of the Second World War it was assumed that the collection had been lost. It was feared that Ruysch’s specimens had suffered the same fate as those of Rau and Albinus, which had been preserved in Leiden. When Leiden’s anatomical cabinet was evacuated during the Second World War, its contents were a sorry sight: ‘Eight hundred dirty bottles, many with mouldy contents, had to be taken to the cellars of the Anatomical Laboratory for safekeeping. Many preparations had dried out; many old vials were cracked and discoloured. The corks had fallen into the bottles, and many of the splendid preparations of intestines had been reduced to a turbid mass at the bottom of the vial.’ Clearly, the Leiden collection had been poorly conserved, and there, too, one heard the apparently irresistible story that the alcohol had been drunk before it had had time to evaporate. It was rumoured that a laboratory assistant ‘had made regular trips to the cellar to uncork a vial or two and take a hearty swig of liquor balsamicus’.51 Ruysch’s collection had indeed suffered a similar fate. When the famous embryologist Karl Ernst von Baer became curator of the Kunstkamera in 1843, he discovered various jars with cracks, and many others from which the liquor balsamicus had wholly or partly evaporated. Bits of the embalmed preparations had been eaten away by insects. Of the original collection of 2,000 objects, more than 600 had perished. Von Baer had all the wet preparations put into new jars and closed, not with pigs’ bladders, but with hermetically sealed glass lids. He thus succeeded in saving what remained, but the collection fell into neglect again in the years to follow. A subsequent inventory, drawn up in 1906, listed only 1,086 specimens. When Leningrad had recovered from the German siege in the Second World War, a new catalogue was compiled, this one containing 935 preparations made by Ruysch. The news then spread—in the West as well—that a good deal of his work had survived and could be seen in the Leningrad Kunstkamera. V.N. Ternovsky, an anatomist from the University of Kazan, had already reported this at an international

50 51

Hyrtl, Handbuch der praktischen Zergliederungskunst, 592–598. Elshout, Leidse kabinet, 3–4.

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Fig. 48 Hands holding organs, from the collection of the Kunstkamera in St Petersburg (Rosamond Purcell).

conference held in 1927, but the myth of the collection’s demise was proving difficult to dispel. Günter Mann, a Frankfurt physician sent in the early 1960s to investigate the matter, found Ruysch’s preparations in the gallery above the top floor of the Kunstkamera, ‘systematically and soberly placed next to one another’ in large display cases with doors and side panels of glass. Little was left of the old draperies and arrangements: ‘They have disappeared. But the extremities, at least, still have pieces of lace covering the place where they were severed, and an empty child’s hand still holds, as it originally did, a small injected heart. I saw the collection for the first time on a Sunday afternoon in November 1960. Visitors were crowding around the objects on display . . . On my next visit it was the same, and guides were shepherding large groups of curious visitors.’52

52 Mann, Anatomische Sammlung, 177–178. Günter Mann also heard the following story from physicians in Leningrad: ‘During the last World War, during the distress of the German siege of Leningrad, inhabitants of the city were said to have stolen the preparations because of their alcoholic content.’ That, too, was a myth, because, as Mann testified, ‘the glass jars, carefully guarded and conserved, survived those difficult times in the cellar of the museum’.

Fig. 49

Foetus in a hand, from the collection of the Kunstkamera in St Petersburg (Rosamond Purcell).

ruysch’s legacy 445

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After the fall of the Iron Curtain, it became clear once and for all that many of the three-hundred-year-old preparations still existed, though usually not in their original state. The embalmed preparations, in particular, had largely lost their much-admired natural appearance, and the wet preparations were not in the best of shape either. Thorough conservation treatment was necessary. After the War, efforts were made in Leiden to save as much as possible of the work of Rau and Albinus, and similar rescue efforts were undertaken in St Petersburg under the supervision of the Dutch conservation specialist Willem Mulder. The skeletons of foetuses and babies had perished, as had all the compositions containing skeletons, animals and plants. What remained were the wet preparations. The jars were cleaned and the cloudy fluid replaced, and specimens that were no longer suspended because the horse hair had broken were remounted. Finally, the jars were tightly sealed. All the preparations were thus restored as much as possible to their original state.53 During restoration it was found that the preparations were preserved in ethanol and sometimes oil of turpentine, but the fact that the jars had all been replaced in the nineteenth century made it impossible to say whether Ruysch himself had used these liquids.54 A number of jars, however, contained the residue of his red injection fluid, making it possible to verify that Ruysch had dyed his fluid with cinnabar, the red or crystalline form of mercuric sulphide, rather than carmine, which is obtained from cochineal and was used in Ruysch’s day as a pigment in paint. Neither tallow nor wax was found, although it was established that the injection fluid contained animal fat. But no significant differences were found between Ruysch’s working method and those of his contemporaries, and so, once again, the secret of his art failed to be revealed. The newly restored preparations led to the opening in September 2003 of a new permanent exhibition of Frederik Ruysch’s work in the St Petersburg Kunstkamera, where it still attracts, just as it did in Ruysch’s day, a steady stream of visitors from all over the world.

53

Willem J. Mulder, Anna Radziun, A new conservation process for the Frederik Ruysch Anatomy Collection in the St. Petersburg Kunstkammer. 54 Luyendijk-Elshout suggested the use of ‘Nantes brandy’, a good cognac whose alcoholic content was just over fifty percent (Leidse kabinet).

Fig. 50

A foetus in a glass jar, before (left) and after (right) conservation treatment in St Petersburg (Willem J. Mulder).

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Fig. 51 A three-hundred-year-old foetus from Ruysch’s collection, undergoing conservation treatment in St Petersburg (Willem J. Mulder).

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INDEX OF NAMES Adams, Archibald 321 Addison, Joseph 299 Adriaansz, Pieter (Verduijn) 101–103, 113, 151 n. 4, 152, 154–155, 170, 194–195, 198, 200, 218, 263, 302, 354, 368, 415, 418, 424–425 Aelst, Willem van 77, 167, 430 Aesclepius 431 Albinus, Bernhard 302, 416 Albinus, Bernhard Siegfried 390, 408, 437 Alexander the Great 20 Amman, Johan 440 Amman, Johann Konrad 249 Amya, Herman 222 Anna Maria de’ Medici 348 Antonisz, Jan (Antonides van der Goes) 85 n. 32, 98 n. 52 Apollo 83, 128, 222–223 Aristotle 6–7, 9, 35, 38–39, 41, 70, 128–129, 132, 191, 376, 377–379, 406 Arlebout, Ysbrand Gijsbert 365, 436 Arminius, Jacob 216 Aselli, Gasparo 23–24, 33, 326 Avicenna 129 Backer, Adriaan 83–84, 138, 151 Backer, Jacob 83, 151 Bacx, Johan 161 Baer, Karl Ernst von 383 n. 79, 443 Baerle, Caspar van (Barlaeus) 202 Bake, Laurens 228, 235–236, 242 n. 63 Bakker, Arie 424 Balzac, Honoré de xiii Barbette, Paulus 21, 29 n. 25 Bartholin(us), Thomas (Bertelsen) 24, 27, 31–32, 35, 43, 49, 70, 129, 225, 256, 326 Bartolotti, Willem 87 Bassand, Johann Baptista 428 Beaumont, Simon van 456 Bell, Hilary xv Bempden, Egidius van den 419 Benavente, Samuel de Lion 354 Berchem, Anna van 3, 62 n. 2 Berger, Johann Gottfried 307 Berkeley, William 61, 78, 428

Bernagie, Pieter 172, 189–190, 216–218, 220, 263 Beuningen, Coenraad van 39, 86–87, 158, 161, 172 Beverwijk, Johan van 89, 127 Bidloo, Govert 54, 98–100, 105, 111–114, 120–121, 127, 149–150, 152, 156, 173, 220, 223–224, 227, 248, 253, 266, 313, 387, 407, 416 Bidloo, Lambert 98–99, 233, 249 n. 73 Bidloo, Nicolaas 249 n. 73, 251, 330, 404 Bils, Louis de 13, 18–20, 29, 43, 62, 177 Blaes, Gerard 43, 69, 77, 80, 82, 123, 128–129, 156, 160, 164, 172, 189, 213, 217, 330 Blaes, Johan 131 Blair, Patrick 312 Blankaart, Steven 191, 330, 372 Block, Agneta 290 Bloemsaat, Jan Jansz 250 Blotelingh, Abraham 221 Blumentrost, Laurens 334–335 Boccone, Paolo 158 Boë, François dele (see Deleboë) Boekelman, Andries 89, 101, 103–105, 109, 116 n. 8, 120, 122, 149, 151 n. 4, 152, 170 n. 35, 194, 196–197, 415 Boekelman, Cornelis 170 n. 35, 303, 352–354, 360 Boerhaave, Herman 313, 323, 327, 334, 365, 387, 393, 398–399, 411, 416, 428, 440 Boerhaave, Margaretha 440 Bohle, Johann Christoph 405, 409, 412–413, 435 Bontekoe, Cornelis 187, 190, 215 Bontekoe, Ysbrand 1 Bontemantel, Hans 81 n. 27 Boom, Hendrik 266 Borst, Gerrit 303, 418, 423 Bortel, Gommer van 170, 195–196, 263, 354 Bosch, Gerard van den 133, 137 Bosch, Petrus van den 133 Boshuijsen, Adriaan 166 Bourignon, Antoinette 135 Bouwmeester, Johannes 140, 144–145 Boyle, Robert 32, 34, 48, 71, 73

466

index of names

Bradley, Richard 323, 328, 389 Brandt, Gerard 157, 273 Brandt, Johannes 251, 273 Brants, Christoffel 332, 337 Breijne, Jacob 163 Browne, Edward 80 Browne, Thomas 80 Bruijn, Cornelis de 252 n. 81, 316, 331 Bruijn, Johannes de 353 Bruin, Claas 430–431 Bully, Eugène de 435 Burggraeve, Adolphe xiv Campdomerc, Johannes 229 Campen, Jacob van 17 Cant, Arent 398, 421, 433 Casserio, Giulio 212 n. 21 Catharina (wife of Peter the Great) 333 Celsus 129 Cervantes, Miguel de 141 Charles V 11 Cheselden, William 420 Claesz, Ruysch 2 Cloes, Dirk 103 n. 62, 249 n. 73, 264, 285 Cock, Johannes 137 Coenerding, Jan 99 n. 54, 106, 112, 121, 125, 126 n. 17, 127, 141, 146, 149–150, 152 Colijn (lawyer) 198 Colot, Philippe 197 Commelin, Caspar 201, 316, 324, 388 Commelin, Jan 160, 163–164, 170, 174, 176 Coolaart, Hester 249 Coolaart, Pieter 249 Copernicus 39 Court van der Voort, Pieter de la 332, 349 Cowper, William 266–267 Coxe, William 442 Craanen, Theodoor 187, 379 Croix, Pieter de la 223 Cyprianus, Abraham 133, 182, 194, 198, 218, 225, 300 Cyprianus, Allard 101–103, 113, 133, 136, 149–150, 197–198, 415 Daremberg, Charles xiv n. 3 Dashwood, George 299 Daubenton, Louis 438 David (prophet) 273 Deichsel, Johann Gottlieb 386 Deijman, Jan 64, 72

Deknatel, Adrianus 431 Deleboë, Frans (Franciscus Sylvius) 21, 31, 36, 41, 61, 378 Democritus 272–273 Denijs, Jacobus 354 Descartes, René 35, 37–38 Desnoues, Guillaume 340, 392, 411 Dioscorides 37, 298 n. 51 Does, Willem van der 452 Dortmond, Bonaventura van 96, 98, 138, 146 Douglas, John 420 Dran, Henri-François le 452 Driessen, Jozien 335 n. 23 Duverney, Joseph-Guichard 155, 218, 295, 418 Ende, Frans van den 143 Erasistratus 232 Erndtl, Christian Heinrich 300, 409 Erskine, Robert (Areskin) 330, 334, 339, 371 Ettmüller, Michael Ernst 255 Evelyn, John 34 Esau 106 Fagel, Caspar 310 Fahrenheit, Daniel Gabriel 393 Falloppio, Gabriele 377–378 Famars, de 419 Feitama, Sybrand 431 Ferdinando de’ Medici 77 Flines, Philip de 221–223 Florianus, Daniel 111–114 Folkema, Jacob 399, 402–403 Fontenelle, Bernard le Bovier de xv, 435 Foot, Jesse 442 Foss, Laurids 84 Frans, Pieter de (Francius) 166 Frederik Hendrik (stadholder) 4, 17 Frère Jacques (Jacques Beaulieu) 257, 261–264, 419 Frentz, Gerhard 229 Friedrich August 304, 409–410, 430 Friedrich August II 430 Friedrich Wilhelm (King of Prussia) 410 Galen 6–9, 11–12, 23, 25, 32, 35, 42, 70, 83, 129, 186, 191, 212, 230, 376, 406 Galilei, Galileo 77 Gaub, Johann 229, 256 Geoffroy, Claude-Joseph 438 Gölicke, Andreas Ottomar 235 Goliath 128

index of names Golovin, Fyodor 252 Gool, Johan van 454 Gould, Stephen J. xv Graaf, Reinier de 47, 52, 73, 80, 211, 230, 318, 366–367, 371, 378, 380 Gracht, Jacob van der 9 Graef, Hendrik de 72 Graff, Dorothea 292, 333 Grätz, Johann Heinrich 232 Gravesande, Willem Jacob’s 328 Grew, Nehemiah 379 Groenevelt, Johannes 196 Gross, H.F. 405 Gsell, Georg 333, 339 Guenellon, Pieter 68 n. 9, 157–158, 185 n. 54, 189, 214, 244 n. 65, 251, 261–262, 302, 326, 335 Gundelsheimer, Andreas 324 Gutschoven, Gerard van 53 Haller, Albrecht von 389, 407 Halma, François 294 Ham, Johan 379 Harvey, William 29, 377 Hecquet, Philippe 309, 365, 366 n. 37, 401, 404, 426 Heem, Jan Davidsz de 168, 430 Heijn, Jan 351, 428 Heister, Lorenz 198, 302, 322–323, 330, 416–417, 430 n. 29 Hellenbroek, Abraham 427 n. 21 Hellenbroek, Anna Geertruijd 170 Hellenbroek, Elisabeth Susanna 426 Hellenbroek, Frederik Hendrik 170 Hellenbroek, Isaac 170, 386, 426–427 Heraclitus 272, 273 Hermann, Paul 311 Hertwig, Oscar 383 n. 79 Heucher, Johann Heinrich von 409 Highmore, Nathaniel 229, 426 Hippocrates 6, 70, 114, 187, 201, 203, 257–258, 326, 376, 378 Hobbes, Thomas 318 Homer 146 Hondecoeter, Abraham 112 Hooftman, Elisabeth 250 Hooghe, Romein de 222–223, 225, 227 Hooghuijs, Mattheus 104 Hoogvliet, Arnold 431 Hooke, Robert 33, 75 Hoorn, Anna van 183 Hoornbeek, Johannes 41 Horace 178

467

Horne, Jan van 20, 24, 40–42, 45, 61, 73, 77, 106 Horst, Abel 151 n. 4, 152, 189, 285 Hotton, Pieter 324 n. 6 Houbraken, Arnold 151, 225 n. 39, 349 Hove, Johan van den 18 Hovius, Jacob 309 Hovy, Jan 251 Hudde, Johannes 74–76, 81, 97, 160, 186, 318 Huijberts, Cornelis 271, 275, 375 Huijghens, Theodoor 333 Huydecoper, Johan 86–87, 160–161, 163, 167, 174 n. 36, 186, 252 Huydecoper, Johannes 216 Huygens, Christiaan 19, 31, 32 n. 26, 39–40, 71, 75, 86, 157 Huygens, Constantijn 3, 223 Huygens, Constantijn (Jr) 227 n. 41 Huygens, Lodewijk 19 n. 17 Huysum, Jan van 349 Hyrtl, Joseph 436, 442 Iperen, Pasquier Jorisz van

82

Janssonius van Almeloveen, Theodorus 461 Jansz, Ferdinand 234–235 Johan Maurits of Nassau 4 Johann Wilhelm, Elector Palatine 241, 321, 324, 347–348 Johnson, Samuel 61 Jonston, Jan 292 Joubert, Jean 339 Juvenal 142, 238 Kaau Boerhaave, Abraham 440 Kaau Boerhaave, Herman 440 Kaau, Jacob 440 Keerwolf, Bartholomeus 233 Kempis, Thomas à 404 Kerckrink, Dirk 78, 85, 182, 373 Kiggelaar, Frans 451 Koerbagh, Adriaan 143 Kurakin, Boris Ivanovich 332 Ladmiral, Johannes 308, 399 n. 21 Lairesse, Gerard de 120, 221, 224, 226, 266, 348, 399 Lamzweerde, Jan Baptist van 72, 127, 140 Langendijk, Pieter 430 Leeuwenhoek, Anthony van 379 Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm 334

468

index of names

Leopardi, Giacomo xiii, xiv n. 1 Leopold (emperor) 324 Lescaille, Katharina 174, 217 n. 34, 249 n. 73 Lieberkühn, Johann Nathanaël 438 Limborch, Philippus van 249 Linden, Johannes Antonides van der 98 n. 52 Linné, Carl von (Linnaeus) 440 Lister, Martin 155, 262, 309 Locke, John 68 n. 9, 157, 185 n. 54, 215, 217, 249, 252 n. 82, 263, 266, 318, 326–327 Lourens, Elsje 149 Lower, Richard 326 Machiavelli 143 MacNaghten, Alexander 311 Maes, Everhard van der 13 Maes, Nicolaas 150 Malpighi, Marcello 75, 213, 313, 393 Mann, Gunter 444 Marchetti, Pietro de 129, 232 Marcus Aurelius 7 Marseus, Otto (van Schrieck) 77, 166–167 Marsigli, Luigi Ferdinando 392 Mauriceau, François 115, 362 Medici, Cosimo de’ 77, 80, 241, 349 Meekeren, Job van 61, 64, 106, 372 Meibom, Heinrich 31 Meijer, Herman 354 n. 14 Meijer, Lodewijk 140–146 Menshikov, Alexander 247, 331 Merian, Maria Sibylla 290, 292 n. 37, 297–300, 314, 324 n. 6, 333, 431 Michelangelo 9 Miller, Philip 429 Milly, Jean de 151 n. 4, 152 Milly, Philip de 72 n. 15 Minjon, Abraham 249 Miskolczy-Szíjgyartó, Johan 316 Morell, Jacob 290 Morgagni, Giovanni Battista 329, 388 Mulder, Josef 270, 291 Mulder, Willem J. 286, 446–448 Munnicks, Jan 173–175, 350–351 Munnicks, Geertruid 351 Mussapha, Imanuel 427 Musschenbroek, Jan van 197 n. 76, 302 Musschenbroek, Samuel van 56 Naboth, Martinus 383 Neck, Johan van 151–152 Neck, Siebregje van 174

Neer, Eglon van der 168 n. 33, 348 Neer, Pieter van der 348 Newton, Isaac 328, 391, 422 Nieuwentijt, Bernard 319 Nuck, Anthony 224, 228 Oldenburg, Henry 31, 32 n. 26, 77, 84, 378 n. 71, 379 Opperloo, Gerrit 428 Orville, Willem d’ 312 Ovid 95, 183 n. 43, 273 Paamburg, Anthonie van 152 Pajot, Louis-Léon 339 Paré, Ambroise 46 Pecquet, Jean 23 Peene, Elisabeth van 81 Pels, Andries 140, 145, 221 Pelt, Jeremias 352 Percival, John 340, 349 n. 3 Peter the Great, Tsar 436 Petiver, James 296, 299, 310, 312 Philat 251 Pijl, Paulus 125 Piso, Willem 67, 87, 89, 100, 113 Plaatman, Pieter 353, 402, 425 Plemp, Vopiscus Fortunatus 131 Pliny the Elder 6 Pluimer, Jan 209, 223 Pool, Abraham Ruysch 350 Pool, Frederik Ruysch 351, 355, 430, Pool, George Ruysch 349 Pool, Isaac Ruysch 430 Pool, Jan Willem 348 Pool, Jurriaan 169–172, 262, 347–349, 351, 386, 426–428, 431 Pool, Maria Margaretha 440 Pool, Rachel 347–349, 386, 431 Poot, Abraham van 86 Portal, Antoine xiv Portal, Paul 357, 362 Post, Pieter 4, 17, 50 n. 39, 72 n. 15, 166 Post, Frans 5, 67 Post, Jan 166 Post, Maria 17–18, 62, 72, 168 n. 33, 174, 192, 336, 351, 386–387 Post, Maurits 166 Posthumus, Vincent 430 Primrose, James 131 Ptolemy 6 Purcell, Rosamond xv, 276–277, 281, 284, 444–445 Quina, Abraham

233

index of names Raey, Johannes de 81, 128 Rau, Johann Jakob 218–219, 256, 263, 267–268, 354, 366, 387, 419 Ravenswaay, Lysbeth Jans van 109 Ray, John 165, 299 n. 52, 319 Raye, Jacob Bicker 458 Redi, Francesco 158 n. 18, 377 Régis, Pierre 423 Rembrandt 63, 69, 83–84, 202, 314, 413 Reverhorst, Maurits van 455 Richter, Wilhelm Michael von 442 Rieger, Johann Christoph 437 Riemer, Abraham de 459 Roelofs, Maritje 79 Roonhuijsen, Hendrik van 79, 88, 90, 115 Roonhuijsen, Rogier van 89, 95, 105, 123, 352–354 Rothé, Jan 137 Rouhault, Pierre-Simon 339 Rumph, Christian 13 Ruysch, Aaltje 4 Ruysch, Anna 171, 173 Ruysch, Catharina 166 Ruysch, Elisabeth 35 Ruysch, Gijsbert (grandfather) 2 Ruysch, Gijsbert (brother) 17, 62 Ruysch, Hendrik (father) 3, 62 Ruysch, Hendrik (brother) 3, 15, 16, 17, 50 n. 39, 62 Ruysch, Hendrik (son) 151–152, 170–174, 202, 231, 257–258, 282, 292, 296, 312, 355–361, 369, 399, 410–412, 416 Ruysch, Johan 227 Ruysch, Lucretia 252 Ruysch, Maria 4 Ruysch, Maria Jacoba 174, 351, 408, 428 Ruysch, Nicolaas 4 Ruysch, Petronella (Pieternel) (daughter) 173–174, 350, 352 Ruysch, Petronella (Pieternel) (sister) 16, 62 n. 2 Ruysch, Rachel xv Ruyter, Michiel de 61, 435 Saint-André, Nathanael 389 Santen, Jacob van 50 n. 39 Schaep, Maria 341 Schaep, Pieter 189 Scham, Jacob 392 Schelhammer, Günter Christoph Schijn, Hermanus 365 Schijnvoet, Simon 393 Schoemaker, Andries 430

253

469

Schoemaker, Gerrit 429–430 Schouten, Wouter 192, 225 Schreiber, Johann Friedrich 344, 383, 387, 405, 434 Schrick, Jan 386 Schult, John 299 Schumacher, Johann Daniel 330, 392 Schuyl, Floris 58 Seba, Albert 312, 329–331, 334–335, 393 Senguerd, Arnold 69 Sermes, Gerard 418 Sermes, Jan 416, 418 Sherard, William 241, 296–297, 401 Sibelius, Caspar 290 n. 33 Sieuwertsz, Wiebe 342–343 Slade, Cornelis 190 Slade, Matthew (Sladus) 64, 70, 74, 76, 82, 106, 129, 134, 158, 193, 233 Sloane, Hans 5 n. 5, 161 n. 23, 295, 296 n. 44, 309, 321, 324, 333 n. 18, 440 Smetius, Johannes 241, 321 Smids, Ludolf 223, 430 Smith, Samuel 266 Solingen, Cornelis 93 Spinoza, Baruch 75 Stalpart van der Wiel, Cornelis 18 Starrenburg, Johan 297, 310 Steen, Jan 430 Stensen, Niels 32, 35, 43, 49, 59, 69–70, 77–78, 88, 130–131, 136, 182, 216, 378 Stuart, Alexander 323 Swam, van der 353–354 Swammerdam, Jan 33, 49, 58, 70, 75–76, 78, 80, 82, 85, 87, 132, 134, 136, 157, 158 n. 18, 167, 231, 233, 317, 321, 377–378, 380 Swartepaart, Abraham 95 Swieten, Gerard van 440 Taenman, Gerrit 15 Tasman, Abel 1 Thévenot, Melchisedec 59, 70, 317 Titsingh, Abraham 219 Tournefort, Joseph Pitton de 298, 324 Trip, Jan 401 Tromp, Maarten Harpertsz 428 Tulp, Claas Pietersz 63, 69, 72, 86, 372 Tzeeuwen, Abraham 335–336, 428 Uffenbach, Zacharias Conrad von 313 Ulhoorn, Hendrik 198, 265, 305, 387 n. 6, 417–418, 421, 425, 432 Valckenier, Gillis 86 Valckenisse, Maria Margaretha van

55

470

index of names

Vallan, Jacob 225 Vater, Abraham 365, 405, 430 Veen, Cornelia Maria 157 Veen, Egbert 100, 138, 157, 189, 252 n. 82 Verduijn, Adriaan 263, 302, 354, 418, 424–425 Verheyen, Philippe 462 Vesalius 11–13, 33, 37, 63, 100, 120, 121 n. 14, 220, 225, 238, 256, 266, 274, 326 Vettevogel, Jan Pietersz 342 Vicq, François de 89 Vieussens, Raymond 306 Vignois, Jan 16 Vignois, Weijna 16 Vincent, Levinus 241, 297, 299, 321, 324 n. 6, 328, 338 Virgil 146 Visscher, Adolf 80 Vlaming van Oudshoorn, Cornelis de 96 Volder, Burcher de 253 Vondel, Joost van den 99, 222 Vonk, Jan 4, 12 Vorstius, Adolf 37 Vos, Jan 141 Vrij, Sebastiaan Egbertsz de 150

Wagstaffe, William 437 Walford, Benjamin 266 Wandelaar, Jan 391, 397–400, 402, 411 Warner, Edward 48 Weenix, Jan 348 Werff, Adriaen van der 348 Wickham, Nathaniel 302 Wilde, Jacob de 251, 333, 393 Wilde, Maria de 251 Willem Alexander xiii Willem II 17 Willem III 86, 137, 161, 225, 227–228, 236, 266–267, 313 Willis, Thomas 72 Wilson, Scott xv Winslow, Jakob 265, 357, 392 Wissel, Johannes van 160 Withoos, Alida 174 Withoos, Matthias 167, 174 Witsen, Nicolaas 86–87, 160, 186, 223, 245, 248, 316, 338 Witt, Johan de 86, 225 Woodward, John 302 Yonge, James

459