Background
Felix Plater was born in October of 1536, in Basel, Switzerland, the son of Thomas Platter, a well-known printer.
Platter, Felix,1536 - 1614, Swiss physician (medical doctor), professor and city physician in Basel.
University of Basel, Basel, Basel-City, Switzerland
At the age of twenty-one, Felix Plater returned to Basel to present his medical thesis, for which he was awarded the doctorate on 20 September 1557.
1584
A portrait of Felix Plater by Hans Bock.
1656
The anatomist Felix Platter, seated at a table covered with surgical instruments in a room with two other men, below which are the figures of Hippocrates and Galen. Engraving.
Felix Plater. Reproduction of line engraving by Hubert.
Platter’s anatomy. Platter described the movements of floaters in the eye and he gave an account and interpretation of vertigo: “An intense, uniform and extended movement of the head transfers itself in a similar way to the spiritus. Despite holding the head still afterward, it appears to continue moving for a while, before it eventually feels still. This is the basis for dizziness if one rotates the head and body in a circle for a long time.”
1584
A portrait of Felix Plater by Hans Bock.
1656
The anatomist Felix Platter, seated at a table covered with surgical instruments in a room with two other men, below which are the figures of Hippocrates and Galen. Engraving.
Felix Plater. Reproduction of line engraving by Hubert.
University of Basel, Basel, Basel-City, Switzerland
At the age of twenty-one, Felix Plater returned to Basel to present his medical thesis, for which he was awarded the doctorate on 20 September 1557.
Platter’s anatomy. Platter described the movements of floaters in the eye and he gave an account and interpretation of vertigo: “An intense, uniform and extended movement of the head transfers itself in a similar way to the spiritus. Despite holding the head still afterward, it appears to continue moving for a while, before it eventually feels still. This is the basis for dizziness if one rotates the head and body in a circle for a long time.”
Thomas Platter the Elder, Swiss humanist, printer, writer.
Thomas Platter the Younger
Guillaume Rondelet, French anatomist, naturalist.
https://www.amazon.com/Cognoscendis-Praedicendis-Praecauendis-Curandisque-Incommodantibus/dp/1246611783/?tag=2022091-20
1602
https://www.amazon.com/professoris-basileensis-Observationum-affectibus-functionum/dp/B07R1422B9/?tag=2022091-20
1614
https://www.amazon.com/Die-Medizinische-Faculta%CC%88t-Basel-German-ebook/dp/B01D24TMCC/?tag=2022091-20
1860
anatomist Botanist physician psychiatrist scientist
Felix Plater was born in October of 1536, in Basel, Switzerland, the son of Thomas Platter, a well-known printer.
Platter was sent by his father to Montpellier to start a six-year course of study under Guillaume Rondelet. At the age of twenty-one, he returned to Basel to present his medical thesis, for which he was awarded the doctorate on 20 September 1557.
After receiving his Doctor of Medicine degree from Basel University, a few years later Platter was teaching applied medicine at the University of Basel, and in 1571 the city council named him a chief physician. His interest in natural history led him to assemble a remarkable herbarium, which was highly admired by scholars of the time.
Platter is known today for his medical activity and his works on human pathology, especially De corporis humani structura, which made him famous. From his books and especially from public autopsies, which he performed in Basel, he soon acquired a reputation as an important anatomist.
Platter's major achievements were presented in his outstanding work on pathology, such as Praxeos sen de cognoscendis… (1602), where he proposed a classification of diseases, which differed greatly from that followed by practitioners. In Praxis medica he presented precise descriptions of illnesses and an analysis of their symptoms.
Another work was titled, Observationum in hominis affectibus (1614), which contains rigorous descriptions of human ailments and the search for their causes, as well as accounts of gynecological diseases and investigations of the infectious nature of illnesses.
Platter’s statistical studies of, and memoirs on, the plague contain an abundance of useful data. As a practicing pediatrician, he was ahead of his time, and his works were authoritative until the beginning of the eighteenth century.
Also, in the view of historian David Wootton, developed in the book Bad Medicine, Platter was the first proponent of the Germ theory of disease.
Since Felix Plater was the son of Lutheran humanist, most likely he retained the same religious affiliation.
One of the first to study certain mental disturbances scientifically, Platter refused to consider them the work of a demon - unlike most of his contemporaries - but sought their physiological causes. Insanity, he believed, must be attributed to natural causes, whether they resulted from the influence of overeating or from dissolute living.
Platter was a faithful disciple of Eustachi, Falloppio, and above all, of Vesalius, from whose De humani corporis fabrica much of his own writing on anatomy was derived.
Thomas Platter the Elder (12 February 1499, Grächen, Valais – 26 January 1582, Basel) was a Swiss humanist scholar, writer, Lutheran humanist, schoolmaster, and printer.
1574 – 1628
Guillaume Rondelet (27 September 1507 – 30 July 1566), known also as Rondeletus (Rondeletius), was Regius professor of medicine at the University of Montpellier in southern France and Chancellor of the University between 1556 and his death in 1566. He achieved renown as an anatomist and a naturalist with a particular interest in botany and zoology. His major work was a lengthy treatise on marine animals, which took two years to write and became a standard reference work for about a century afterward, but his lasting impact lay in his education of a roster of star pupils who became leading figures in the world of late-16th-century science.
