Nostradamus

Michel de Nostredame, known by the Latinised name Nostradamus, lived from December 1503 to July 1566 and worked in sixteenth-century France as an apothecary, a physician and an astrologer. His family had been Jewish but had converted to Catholic Christianity a generation before his birth. He studied at the University of Avignon until an outbreak of plague closed it, worked for several years as an apothecary, and then entered the University of Montpellier, only to be expelled almost at once because university statutes forbade the manual trade of apothecary. After his first wife and two children died in the plague of 1534 he worked against the disease alongside other doctors. He is far better known today for his almanacs and for Les Prophéties, published in 1555, a collection of 942 poetic quatrains. Popular writers credit the verses with predicting world events, while academic sources reject any genuine prophetic ability and attribute such readings to misinterpretation, so the atlas records him as a physician and apothecary whose public reputation rests on a disputed prophetic legend.