Olaus Rudbeck

• 1. Introduction

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  Olaus Rudbeck stood on a roof in Uppsala in 1702 and shouted orders to the townspeople while his own house burned beneath him. He was a Swedish scientist and writer, born on the 13th of September 1630, and he would be dead before the year ended. He taught medicine at Uppsala University and held the post of rector magnificus there for several periods. Sweden also knew him as Olof Rudbeck the Elder, a name that set him apart from his son. Scholars sometimes used the Latin form Olaus Rudbeckius. His reputation rests on two very different pursuits, the study of the human body and the study of language. He also made his mark in music and botany. One of his ideas was that Sweden had once been Atlantis. So how does one man cut into bodies, plant gardens, and argue for a lost island kingdom in the north? Who really deserves the credit for a discovery he showed to a queen? And why did a man whose theories drew satire stay a national icon for so long?

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• 2. Vessels Before a Queen

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  In the spring of 1652, Rudbeck demonstrated a new anatomical finding at the court of Queen Christina of Sweden. He had been studying the lymphatic vessels, the channels that carry lymph through the body. His supporters in Sweden say he was the first person ever to discover the lymphatic system. The paper trail tells a more tangled story. Rudbeck published nothing until the fall of 1653. By then Thomas Bartholin, a Danish scientist, had already printed a description of a similar discovery of his own. That delay opened a priority dispute that followed Rudbeck for the rest of his career. Rudbeck was one of the pioneers in the field, but he was not alone in it. Two other names, Gasparo Aselli and Jean Pecquet, also belong to the crowded list of early discoverers.

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• 3. A Theatre Under the Dome

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  In 1660, Uppsala University appointed Rudbeck professor of medicine. His research had already won him the support of the Queen, and he used it to shape the university around his work. To make human anatomy easier to study, he had a cupola built on top of the Gustavianum, a university building. Inside the cupola he built a Theatrum anatomicum, an arena-like space where dissection could be carried out in front of students. The cupola still stands and remains a landmark of Uppsala. The Gustavianum itself sits in front of the cathedral and is still part of the university.

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• 4. Sweden as Atlantis

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  Between 1679 and 1702, Rudbeck devoted himself to a patriotic project in historical linguistics. The result was a treatise of 3,000 pages in four volumes. In it he set out to prove that Sweden was Atlantis, the cradle of civilization. He also held that Swedish was the original language of Adam. Latin and Hebrew, in his account, had evolved from it. Critics across Scandinavia were not persuaded. The Danish professor Ludvig Holberg and the Swedish author and physician Andreas Kempe both wrote satires based on his writings. The French thinker Denis Diderot later cited Rudbeck's work in his article "Etymologie" in the Encyclopédie. Diderot offered it as a cautionary example of etymology wrongly tied to mythical history. A modern biographer, David King, took a kinder view of parts of this effort.

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• 5. A Family of Theorists

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  Rudbeck was born in Västerås, the son of Bishop Johannes Rudbeckius, who served as personal chaplain to King Gustavus Adolphus. The mockery from Holberg and Kempe, and the dispute with Bartholin, did little to dent his standing. Rudbeck remained a national icon in Sweden for many years. His son, Olof Rudbeck the Younger, who became a botanist, carried the linguistic work forward. The son also helped supply an intellectual reason for power at a time when Sweden aspired to be one of the great powers of Europe. He added his own speculations about a relationship between the Sami and Hebrew languages. These joined his father's long list of fantastical linguistic relationships. A nephew of the elder Rudbeck, Petter Rudebeck, went further still in his antiquarian books. He claimed to locate the scene of the Trojan War, and the ancient city of Troy, in southern Sweden.

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• 6. Humus and Hindsight

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  David King, in his biography of Rudbeck, singles out a method for dating old monuments and graves. Rudbeck measured the thickness of the humus that had gathered over them. Many of his conclusions from this method were erroneous. Even so, King argues that it anticipated the methods of modern archaeology. It was far in advance of most historians and antiquarians of the time. King makes a similar point about the languages. Specific conclusions by father and son about how languages related to each other were disproven. Yet their approach anticipated the later systematic study of Indo-European languages. It also anticipated the scientific proof that languages far apart in geography and history can truly be related. The elder Rudbeck's ambitions in botany, meanwhile, left marks that visitors to Uppsala can still find.

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• 7. Garden and Woodblocks

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  In 1655, Rudbeck established the first botanical garden in Sweden, at Uppsala. It was called Rudbeck's Garden for a hundred years. Then it was renamed for Carl Linnaeus, a student of Rudbeck's son. Linnaeus later named the plant genus Rudbeckia in honor of both Rudbeck and his son. On paper, Rudbeck's ambition was even larger. He planned Campi elysii, a work of 12 volumes covering all known plants of the world. Only two volumes were ever published. They carried life-sized woodcut illustrations of many species, and the woodblocks were cut by a family workshop. Rudbeck himself, his son Olof, his daughters Johanna Christina and Wendela, and other colleagues all took part. About 3,200 woodblocks are thought to have been cut for the series. The 1702 blaze took a large portion of his writings, woodblocks, and copies of the first two volumes. About 140 blocks from volume 1 survive today at the Linnean Society of London.

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• 8. The Nobel Line

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  Uppsala Cathedral holds Rudbeck's grave, at the transept, and he was buried there after dying later in 1702. His family tree did not end with the botanist son. His daughter Wendela, one of the woodblock cutters, married Peter Olai Nobelius, a former student of her father. Their descendants include the Nobel family. Among them were Ludvig Nobel, the founder of Branobel, and Alfred Nobel, the founder of the Nobel Prizes. Through Wendela, a daughter who once cut blocks for a plant book, the name Rudbeck connects to the Nobel Prizes.

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