Herman Boerhaave, the Man and his Work

Professor Lindeboom has assembled in this biography of the leading European physician of his age, twenty years or more deep study of Boerhaave and his works. It is a magnum opus which must for the foreseeable future remain the standard biography of a rare polymath, and it appeared happily in time for the tercentenary celebrations of Boerhaave's birth in 1688. Its publication ifils a longstanding hiatus in medical biography for no definitive life of Boerhaave has been published in English since 1743, when there appeared anonymously a short biography by one of Boerhaave's former pupils, William Burton, whose identity was soon unmasked. There had been in the Gentkeman's Magazine in 1739 a short unsigned tribute to Boerhaave (based on the funeral oration, in 1738, given by Albert Sculpens, the Professor of Oriental Languages at Leyden) later known to have been written by Dr. Samuel Johnson. What emerges clearly from the picture painted by Lindeboom is a dignified figure, who paid little attention to his appearance (though Aert de Gelder, a pupil of Rembrandt, in his portraits draped Boerhaave in rich garments), of prodigious energy and industry, and of towering personal magnetism. It was the last which led Baas to observe that 'his prescriptions were less effective than his personal appearance'. Boerhaave's scholarship cannot be gainsaid; he was described as 'a Triton among minnows'. He occupied at the same time three of the five chairs (chemistry, botany and medicine) in the Faculty at Leyden. His scholarship and industry are shown by his own massive writings including his Elementa Chemiae (1732), and his widely-used clinical texts-Institutiones Medicae (1708) and Aphorismi (1709)-repeatedly published not in Latin only but in many European tongues, including English, and often in pirated editions. He also published critical editions of the works of Vesalius (1725), Luisinus (1728) on syphilis, Aretaeus the Cappodocian (1731) in two volumes, Swammerdam (1737-38) in two volumes and others. His fame as a clinician was legendary in Europe and spread beyond to the East Indies, Ceylon, and China. Indeed, it is said that a letter from China addressed to 'Mr. Boerhaave, Europe', reached him. He saw patients at his home (after his early years he did no domiciliary practice) but most of his consultations were by correspondence. Boerhaave's original clinical observations were few. He described, amongst others, cases of ruptured oesophagus, the aura-like pain preceding rabies, and dilatation of the heart with suffocation from …