Background
Coiter was born in 1534, in Groningen, Netherlands, the son of a jurist.
Via Zamboni, 33, 40126 Bologna BO, Italy
By 1560, and possibly even by 1559, Coiter was at Bologna, where he received the doctorate in medicine on 24 March 1562 and where his researches were guided by Ulisse Aldrovandi and Giulio Cesare Aranzio.
anatomist biologist ornithologist physician
Coiter was born in 1534, in Groningen, Netherlands, the son of a jurist.
Coiter was favored with an excellent education in his native city at St. Martin’s school, where the learned Regnerus Praedinius was master; there he first became acquainted with Galen and dissection. His ability was such that in 1555 the city fathers awarded him a stipend for five years of study at foreign universities. During this period, although dates and movements are not always clear, it is known that his good fortune in enjoying eminent teachers continued. He probably studied with Leonhard Fuchs at Tübingmen. In 1556 he was briefly at Montpellier; he mentions Guyillaume Rondelet and Laurent Joubert, and he also knew Felix Platter. Gabriele Falloppio taught him at Padua, and Bartolomeo Eustachi at Rome. By 1560, and possibly even by 1559, Coiter was at Bologna, where he received the doctorate in medicine on 24 March 1562 and where his researches were guided by Ulisse Aldrovandi and Giulio Cesare Aranzio.
At Bologna Coiter lectured on logic and surgery; and at Bologna his first two publications, tables on human anatomy, were issued. For a time he also taught at Perugia.
A brilliant career seemed assured, but letters written in 1566 by his friend Joachim Camerarius the Younger tell of Coiter’s arrest and imprisonment, first in Rome and then in Bologna. It is generally assumed that his Protestantism was responsible and that he offended the Inquisition. By the fall of 1566, he was back in Germany, where Camerarius smoothed the path for him. He served Pfalzgraf Ludwig VI at Amberg and taught there until 1569, when he became a physician to the city of Nuremberg. Documents in Nuremberg and Erlangen, passages in his works, and inscriptions in copies of these works that he presented to friends attest his anatomical and medical activities in Nuremberg and provide details concerning the publication of the treatises which appeared in that city. Bodies of criminals furnished opportunities for dissection, and Coiter's daily medical practice fostered attention to pathology. Among physicians, he associated not only with Camerarius but also with Georg Palm, Heinrich Wolff, Melchior Ayrer, Franz Renner, and Thomas Erastus of Heidelberg and Basel. On more than one occasion he had sharp brushes with barber-surgeons and quacks. The eminent families Imhof and Kress were served by him. He often traveled outside Nuremberg to treat magisterial, noble, and ecclesiastical patients.
Coiter’s longest excursion from Nuremberg took place from the fall of 1575 to the spring of 1576, when he attended Pfalzgraf Johann Casimir on his expedition to France in support of the Huguenot cause. Coiter did not return from this journey; his death was the result not of military action but of illness, possibly typhus, after peace had been declared and the army was returning to Germany.
His early works on human anatomy were expressly intended for students, as he himself states and as their tabular form favors. In them he still adheres to Galenic doctrine, and they have no essential significance for the history of anatomy. The treatises published at Nuremberg, however, display a greater maturity; a realization that dissection is the most important part of anatomy (both normal and pathological); an appreciation of the work of Vesalius, Fallopio, and Eustachi; and original thought. The treatise on the skeleton of the fetus and of a child six months old points up the differences between these and adult skeletons and shows where ossification begins.
Coiter knew the value of good drawings and himself signed most of the finely drawn copper engravings that illustrate his anatomical work. Case histories are provided in the interesting miscellany of anatomical and surgical observations, and in these for the first time, Coiter described the spinal ganglia and the musculus corrugator supercilii. An interest in anatomical nomenclature and etymology and in balneology is often apparent in his works.
Unillustrated but nonetheless epochal are Coiter’s studies on the development of the chick, begun in Bologna with the encouragement of Aldrovandi and published in Nuremberg; based on observations made on twenty successive days, they presented the first systematic statement since the three-period description provided by Aristotle two millennia before. Coiter worked without a lens but also without Scholastic influence. Twenty-eight years later (1600) Aldrovandi published his account; Girolamo Fabrizio followed in his posthumous work of 1621, Nathaniel Highmore and William Harvey in 1651, and Marcello Malpighi in 1673 and 1675.
With a solid grounding in human (especially skeletal) anatomy, Coiter was well prepared for exploration in comparative anatomy. He covered almost the entire vertebrate series - amphibians, reptiles, birds, and mammals - and was the first to raise this field to independent status in biology, although he emphasized points of difference from human anatomy rather than points of similarity. He recorded what he saw in the living hearts of cats, reptiles, frogs, and several fishes. He called attention to the orbicular muscle of the hedgehog and described the poison gland of the adder. Coiter’s investigation of avian anatomy is particularly significant: he depicted the skeletons of the adder. Coiter’s investigation of avain anatomy is particularly significant: he depicted the skeletons of the crane, the starling, the cormorant, and the parrot; provided a general classification, in tabular form, of the birds known to him; and discovered the tongue and hypobranchial apparatus of the woodpecker.
Coiter left a widow, Helena, who was a foreigner and who was granted permission to remain in Nuremberg two years longer without citizenship.