Thomas Bartholin

• 1. Introduction

  ›

  Thomas Bartholin was born on the 20th of October 1616 into a family that would become one of the most scientifically distinguished in Danish history. Twelve members of that family eventually held professorships at the University of Copenhagen. Yet Thomas himself stood apart from the rest, not merely as a professor or anatomist, but as the man who gave medicine its first complete picture of the human lymphatic system. How did a Danish physician come to map one of the body's great hidden highways? And how did that discovery spark an international priority dispute that would pit Copenhagen against Uppsala? Along the way, Thomas Bartholin also gave science its first written account of freezing pain away, and he described a congenital syndrome that still carries his name. His story runs from the lecture halls of Italy to a farm in Denmark that burned to the ground, taking his library with it.

• 2. A Dynasty of Anatomists

  ›

  Caspar Bartholin the Elder, born in Malmø, Scania in 1585, started his tenure as professor at Copenhagen University in 1613. He published the first collected anatomical work in 1611, laying foundations that his son Thomas would later build on. Thomas was the second of Caspar the Elder's six sons, and when the father died in 1629, the anatomical enterprise did not die with him. Thomas revised, illustrated, and augmented that original work, turning it into the standard reference on anatomy for his era. He added critical updates on William Harvey's theory of blood circulation alongside his own findings on the lymphatic system.

  The family's reach extended across three generations. Rasmus Bartholin, Thomas's younger brother, lived from 1625 to 1698 and contributed to the scientific legacy. Caspar Bartholin the Younger, Thomas's son born in 1655, first described what became known as Bartholin's glands. Another of Thomas's sons, born in 1659, became a professor of history at the University of Copenhagen and was later appointed royal antiquarian and secretary to the Royal Archives. Over a span of 125 years, members of the family served on the medical faculty of the University of Copenhagen, and the scientific accomplishments they accumulated won international acclaim.

• 3. Mapping the Lymphatic System

  ›

  In December 1652, Bartholin published the first full description of the human lymphatic system, a network whose existence had only begun to come into focus in the preceding years. Jean Pecquet had noted the lymphatic system in animals in 1651, and Pecquet's discovery of the thoracic duct and its entry into the veins made him the first person to describe the correct route lymphatic fluid takes into the blood. Bartholin's December 1652 publication extended that picture to the human body.

  The timing immediately generated conflict. Olof Rudbeck, a Swedish anatomist, had presented findings on the human lymphatic system at the court of Queen Christina of Sweden in April-May 1652, before Bartholin published. But Rudbeck delayed writing up his results until 1653, a year after Bartholin's publication appeared. The question of who deserved credit for the human discovery set off an intense priority dispute between the two men. The most famous pupil Bartholin produced from this period was Niels Stensen, also known as Steno, whose own contributions to anatomy and geology would later earn him recognition far beyond Denmark.

• 4. Cold as a Cure

  ›

  Chapter XXII of Bartholin's publication De nivis usu medico observationes variae holds a quiet distinction: it contains the first known written mention of refrigeration anaesthesia. Bartholin was careful to credit the technique's origins elsewhere. He attributed the invention to the Italian surgeon Marco Aurelio Severino of Naples, whom he identified as the first person to present the use of freezing mixtures of snow and ice in 1646. Bartholin himself had learned about the method directly during a visit to Naples, where he encountered Severino's practice firsthand.

  The same volume included a book by his brother Rasmus Bartholin. The work was published in Copenhagen in 1661. Bartholin's account did not claim the method as his own discovery; instead it functioned as the scientific record that preserved and transmitted Severino's technique to a wider learned audience. Bartholin-Patau syndrome, a congenital syndrome of multiple abnormalities produced by trisomy 13, was separately described by Bartholin in 1656, adding another named condition to his medical legacy.

• 5. Fire, Loss, and Royal Favor

  ›

  In 1663 Bartholin purchased the estate of Hagestedgård, apparently seeking a life outside the city. Seven years later, in 1670, fire consumed the farm along with his entire library and many of his manuscripts. The loss was substantial enough to draw the attention of King Christian V of Denmark, who responded in two ways: he appointed Bartholin as his personal physician, and he freed the farm from taxation as recompense for what the fire had destroyed. The salary attached to the royal appointment was described as substantial.

  Bartholin had already maintained ties to the wider European scholarly world earlier in his life. He had visited the Italian botanist Pietro Castelli at Messina in 1644, and his travels to Italy included the Naples encounter with Severino that shaped his work on refrigeration anaesthesia. By 1680 his health had failed. The Hagestedgård estate was sold, and Bartholin returned to Copenhagen, where he died on the 4th of December 1680. He was buried in Vor Frue Kirke, the Church of Our Lady. A street in Copenhagen, Bartholinsgade, carries the family name to this day, and nearby stands the Bartholin Institute. One of the buildings of the University of Aarhus is also named after him.