Konrad Gesner

1516-1565

Swiss Physician, Zoologist, and Botanist

Gesner (also called "Gesnerus") was among the founders of modern zoology. He also made important contributions to botany, biology, natural history, and scientific bibliography.

Born on March 26, 1516, in Zürich, Switzerland, Gesner was the son of a poor Protestant furrier, Ursus Gesner. Because his father could not afford to care for all his children properly, Gesner was raised until 1527 by his uncle, Hans Frick, a chaplain who awakened Gesner's interest in plants and medicinal herbs, and after 1527 by Johann Jakob Ammann, a choirmaster. Gesner's father died alongside the Swiss Reformation leader Ulrich Zwingli in the Battle of Kappel on October 11, 1531, fighting against Zürich's Catholic neighbors.

At school in Zürich, the boy Gesner so impressed his teachers that they fostered his development in every way. They made it financially possible for him to continue his education. In 1533 he entered the University of Bourges, France, to study theology and languages. The next two years he attended the University of Paris. In 1536 he returned to Switzerland to avoid Catholic hostility toward Protestants and enrolled at the University of Basel as a medical student. Throughout the 1530s he taught school to help support himself. From 1537 to 1540 he was professor of Greek at the Lausanne Academy. After briefly studying medicine at the University of Montpellier in 1540, he received his M.D. from the University of Basel in 1541.

Gesner was a tireless worker, a quintessential Renaissance humanist, and a dedicated, unselfish scientist. He was fluent in Hebrew, Greek, Latin, Dutch, French, Italian, German, and Arabic. From 1541 until he died of the plague in Zürich on December 13, 1565, he wrote, edited, or contributed to dozens of books. Among his goals was to help revive ancient learning and use it to promote new research. In 1543 he published a Greek-Latin dictionary and in 1555 Latin excerpts of Greek medical encyclopedist Oribasius of Pergamon (325-403?).

Gesner's major work, Historia animalium (History of Animals), published in five volumes from 1551 to 1587, marked the beginning of modern zoology with a comprehensive catalog of all animals known up to that time. It contains over a thousand beautiful woodcut illustrations, including the famous, but inaccurate, depiction of the rhinoceros by Albrecht Dürer (1471-1528). Evidence of the strong reputation of Historia animalium is that both the text and the illustrations were still being plagiarized 150 years later.

Gesner cataloged plants in Historia plantarum et vires (History of Plants and Powers), published in 1541, and herbal cathartic and emetic agents in Enumeratio medicamentorum purgantium (List of Purgative Medicines), published in 1543.

Before the sixteenth century, the most authoritative catalog of plants and herbal medicines was by ancient Greek botanist Dioscorides Pedanius Anazarbeus (40?-90?). After the untimely death of the brilliant German medical botanist Valerius Cordus (1515-1544), Gesner edited and expanded Cordus's planned revision of Dioscorides, bringing the total of plants described from about 600 to about 1,100, and published it in 1561 as Annotationes in Pedacij Dioscoridis Anazarbei de medica materia (Notes on Dioscorides's materia medica).

Gesner was among the great medical bibliographers. After Symphorien Champier (1472-1539), he was very nearly the earliest. His appendix to De chirurgia scriptores (Authors on Surgery) in 1555 contained the first useful bibliography of surgery. His 1545-55 Bibliotheca universalis (Universal Library), though without a specific medical section, was a primary inspiration for Sir William Osler (1849-1919) to create his monumental Bibliotheca Osleriana (1929). Osler called Gesner the "Father of Bibliography."

In 1943 a new Swiss scholarly journal on the history of medicine and natural sciences was named Gesnerus in his honor.

ERIC V.D. LUFT