Daniel Sennert

Daniel Sennert (born in Breslau, 25 November 1572; died in Wittenberg, 21 July 1637) was a German academic physician and writer on medicine and chemistry. The son of a shoemaker, he studied at Wittenberg and then medicine at Leipzig, Jena and Frankfurt an der Oder, practised briefly in Berlin, and took his medical doctorate at Wittenberg in 1601. In 1602 he became professor of medicine there, a post he held for the rest of his life, and he survived six plague epidemics as a Wittenberg physician before dying of what was diagnosed as plague. His large textbooks, among them the Institutionum medicinae libri V of 1611, the De febribus libri IV of 1619 and the Practicae medicinae issued in six books between 1628 and 1636, made him a widely read teacher. He defended Galen's humoral pathology while borrowing the Paracelsian principles of sulfur, salt and mercury for the chemical treatment of disease, and he tried to reconcile Aristotle, Galen, Paracelsus and corpuscular ideas, a synthesis that later commentators judged in very different ways.