Gesner studied at the University of Strasbourg, where he displayed great linguistic talent and interest in nature.
Gallery of Conrad Gessner
Petersplatz 1, 4051 Basel, Switzerland
Gesner studied medicine at the University of Basel.
Gallery of Conrad Gessner
University of Lausanne, 1015 Lausanne, Switzerland
Gesner secured the professorship in Greek at Lausanne in 1537.
Gallery of Conrad Gessner
5 Boulevard Henri IV, 34090 Montpellier, France
Gesner settled down at the medical school of Montpellier and became a doctor of medicine in 1541. For his degree he successfully defended an anti-Aristotelian thesis on the nature of sensation.
Career
Gallery of Conrad Gessner
Switzerland
Conrad Gessner
Achievements
Switzerland
Gessner was featured on the 50 Swiss francs banknotes issued between 1978 and 1994.
Gesner settled down at the medical school of Montpellier and became a doctor of medicine in 1541. For his degree he successfully defended an anti-Aristotelian thesis on the nature of sensation.
Conrad Gessner was a Swiss physician, naturalist, bibliographer, and philologist. He is known for his systematic compilations of information on animals and plants.
Background
Conrad Gessner was born on March 26, 1516, in Zurich, Switzerland into a family originally from Nuremberg. His father, Urs, was a furrier from Solothurn, Switzerland, who moved to Zurich, becoming a citizen there in 1511. Conrad's mother was Agathe Fritz.
Education
Noting his learning ability at an early age, his father, an impecunious furrier, placed him for schooling in the household of a great-uncle, who augmented his income by growing and collecting medicinal herbs. There young Conrad acquired a basic knowledge of plants and their medicinal uses that led to a lifelong interest in natural history.
At school Gessner’s aptitude, especially for reading the classic works of Latin and Greek authors, so impressed his teachers that a number of them sponsored his continued education. Young Gessner came under the protection of Heinrich Bullinger, Huldreich Zwingli's successor, and Oswald Myconius, the Protestant classics scholar. Their generosity permitted Gessner to undertake studies at the University of Strasbourg, where he displayed great linguistic talent and interest in nature. He then studied medicine at the University of Basel and secured the professorship in Greek at Lausanne in 1537. After wandering across France, Gessner settled down at the medical school of Montpellier and became a doctor of medicine in 1541. For his degree he successfully defended an anti-Aristotelian thesis on the nature of sensation.
Sometime after 1540 Gessner began teaching Aristotelian physics at the Collegium Carolinium. In his spare time he composed his Bibliotheca universalis, a vast encyclopedia in which he listed alphabetically all of the authors who had written in Greek, Latin, and Hebrew, with a listing of all their books printed up to that time. This work made Gessner famous, and offers of scholarly employment poured in, including one from the Fuggers, the richest family of Europe. The Fuggers, however, attached the condition that Gessner embrace Catholicism, which he refused. He spent the rest of his life as a practicing physician at Zurich, leaving only for short expeditions to study flora and fauna.
In 1551 Gessner began work on the most comprehensive survey of nature undertaken during the Renaissance epoch, his monumental Historia animalium, an illustrated encyclopedia of the entire domain of living creatures: birds, fish, and animals. The work was an improvement of earlier European efforts of this kind but reflected the transitional nature of Renaissance scientific thought. Though including descriptions of creatures from remote America, Asia, Russia, and Africa, Gessner also described a host of mythical beasts. Although he had used such taxonomic devices as "genus, species" and "class, order" in his description of plants, Gessner showed little advance over Aristotle in discerning a pattern of biological order, a task to be delayed for almost 2 centuries. His book was beautifully illustrated by artists of the time and included drawings by Albrecht Dürer.
Over his lifetime, Gessner amassed a considerable collection of plants and seeds and made extensive notes and wood engravings. In the last decade of his life he began to compile his major botanical work, Historia plantarum. although he died prior to its publication his materials were utilised by many subsequent authors for the next two hundred years, these included some 1,500 engravings of plants and their important flowers and seeds, most of which were original. The scale and scientific rigour of these were unusual for the time.
In 1555 Gessner wrote a tome on his first love, languages, entitled Mithridates. In 1564 the emperor Ferdinand conferred the title of nobility on Gessner, who designed his coat of arms to portray the books he had written and those that he still planned, including one on nine classical authors and one on gems. In 1565 the plague, which has been identified from Gessner's description as a form of pulmonary bubonic, came to Zurich, and on December 13 he died. A true child of his turbulent times, Gessner was still enthralled by a semireligious vision of nature, a vision composed of an unstable mixture of Aristotle, Scripture, and a passionate desire to explore and observe nature directly and personally.
There was extreme religious tension at the time Historiae animalium came out. Under Pope Paul IV the Pauline Index felt that the religious convictions of an author contaminated all his writings. Since Gessner was Protestant his works were included into this Index of prohibited books. Even though religious tensions were high, Gessner maintained friendships on both sides of the Catholic-Protestant divide. In fact, Catholic booksellers in Venice protested the Inquisition's blanket ban on Gessner's books, and some of his work was eventually allowed after it had been "cleaned" of its doctrinal errors.
Views
Quotations:
"Best of all is it to preserve everything in a pure, still heart, and let there be for every pulse a thanksgiving, and for every breath a song."
Personality
Quotes from others about the person
"He was a one-man search engine, a 16th-century Google with the added bonus of critical evaluation." - Anna Pavord, science writer
Connections
At the age of 19 Conrad married a woman from another poor family, Barbara Singerin, who had no dowry.