Theodericus Ulsenius

Theodericus Ulsenius is the Latin form of the name of the Frisian Dirk van Ulsen, a Renaissance humanist and physician who lived from about 1460 to about 1508. Born in Zwolle in the present day Netherlands, he spent much of his career in Germany, working in Nuremberg, Augsburg, Mainz, Freiburg and Cologne, and in Nuremberg he knew the humanists Conrad Celtes and Sebald Schreyer and came into contact with Hartmann Schedel and Albrecht Dürer. He was chiefly a physician but also wrote on the nature of medicine and the place of doctors in society, setting aside medieval Galenic classifications, reorganizing the medical curriculum, and holding that a doctor needs a high ethical standard beyond fees. During the German syphilis epidemic of 1496 he published a poem on the disease from medical and astrological angles. He returned home in 1507 and died the next year.