Boerhaave, Herman (1668–1738)

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BOERHAAVE, HERMAN (1668–1738)

BOERHAAVE, HERMAN (1668–1738), Dutch professor of medicine, botany, and chemistry. Boerhaave began life as the son of a village minister and ended it as professor at Leiden University and communis Europae praeceptor ('teacher to all of Europe'). He lost his mother at five and his father at fifteen, which left his stepmother with nine children to care for. Widow and children moved to Leiden, where student lodgers helped pay the bills and Boerhaave pursued his studies of and love for chemistry.

Though Boerhaave hoped to follow his father's career path, local patronage steered him in a different direction. He graduated from Leiden in 1690 with a philosophy degree and had begun giving private mathematics lessons when he was offered a job cataloging an important book collection for the university library. The university milieu—especially Leiden's library and anatomy theater—fostered a growing interest in medicine, leading Boerhaave to take a medical degree at the University of Hardewijk in 1693. (Hardewijk was famous for the low cost of its degrees.) Patronage brought him back to Leiden University and he began teaching an introductory course for medical students in 1701.

Boerhaave introduced his students, via Hippocrates and Thomas Sydenham (an English physician known as the "Shakespeare of medicine" [1624–1689]), to medicine as a clinical profession. By 1703 he had announced his preference for iatromechanism (the mechanical theory of medicine) and in subsequent publications, such as Institutiones Medicae (Institutions of Medicine, 1708), he put his mechanical principles and faith in observation to work. Observation became even more important when Boerhaave became botany professor and director of Leiden's botanical garden in 1709. At his inaugural lecture, he codified his philosophy with the motto simplex veri sigillum ('simplicity is the sign of truth'). The more he pursued his work, however, the more of a challenge his creed became. The botanical garden, for example, was planted according to three different systems, and his efforts to bring order to Leiden's botanical collection (see the second volume of his Index Plantarum [Index of Plants], 1720), were only partially successful. It was his student, Carl Linnaeus, who first published a consistent botanical system in 1735.

Moving between simplicity of theory and specificity of medical treatment presented a further challenge. In 1714 the increasingly popular Boerhaave began teaching clinical medicine by taking students to visit patients at Leiden's Caecilia Hospital. Here, he and his students directly faced the tensions between theory and practice. On one hand, students learned diagnosis and care. On the other, they learned a systematic way to account for the human body's economy of health and disease. True to his mechanical views and his desire to consider human physiology in a simple manner—that is, apart from metaphysical questions about the relation between physical being and the cause of life—Boerhaave taught students to focus on the circulation of blood and other bodily fluids, along with involuntary functions such as breathing, sweating, heartbeat, and peristaltic motion.

This systematic mediation between theory and practice made Boerhaave's work enormously influential. As his students graduated, they took with them the tools necessary to make medical study and practice both dynamic and authoritative. Once his followers gained official positions, in Austria, for example, alternative forms of medical practice—such as that of Franz Anton Mesmer (1734–1815)—were driven from court and country. In Edinburgh, Boerhaave's graduates staffed a medical school that eclipsed Leiden's popularity in the second half of the eighteenth century by offering the same kind of inspiring training for a fraction of the price. At the University of Göttingen, Albrecht von Haller (1708–1777) transformed his teacher's mechanical approach into a physiological research program by examining the differences between involuntary and apparently voluntary motion. Refusing to give in to vitalism (the doctrine that life cannot be explained scientifically), Haller argued for the distinction between muscular irritability and nervous sensibility. While Boerhaave and others like him separated theology from medicine out of intellectual modesty regarding divine purpose, and for the sake of clinical and experimental rigor, one former student made a philosophy of this separation. Taking the idea of mechanism to its extreme, Julien Offroy de La Mettrie (1709–1751) argued that humans are nothing but machines.

Boerhaave became Leiden's chemistry professor as well in 1718. His influential lectures presented chemistry's traditional elements (earth, water, air, and fire) as instruments of physical and chemical change. This gave chemistry a level of theoretical simplicity in which theory served to organize increasingly complex laboratory practices (see his Elementa Chemiae [Elements of chemistry], 1732). In both medicine and chemistry, Boerhaave's strength lay in connecting theoretical considerations to the demands and challenges of practice. This, rather than any startlingly original discoveries, is what made him a popular and influential educator. He died in 1738.

See also Botany ; Chemistry ; Haller, Albrecht von ; La Mettrie, Julien Offroy de ; Linnaeus, Carl ; Mechanism ; Medicine ; Mesmer, Franz Anton ; Scientific Method ; Universities.