Andrés Laguna

Andrés Laguna de Segovia was a Spanish humanist physician, pharmacologist and botanist who lived from 1499 to 1559. Born in Segovia to a converted Jewish doctor, he studied arts at Salamanca and then at Paris from 1530, where he went on to medicine and learned Greek and Latin well enough to read Dioscorides in the original. He travelled in England and the Netherlands collecting herbal remedies to test the prescriptions of Dioscorides, was town doctor of Metz from 1540 to 1545, took a doctorate at Bologna and served Pope Julius III. Returning to Spain in 1557, he served as doctor to Charles V and Philip II and created the botanical garden of Aranjuez.