Felix Platter

Felix Platter was a Swiss physician, botanist and diarist, born in Basel in 1536. At sixteen he rode to Montpellier to study medicine under Guillaume Rondelet, and after returning to Basel in 1557 he took the medical doctorate, became city physician and professor of practical medicine, and carried out hundreds of dissections as part of his teaching. His book Praxeos, published in 1602 and 1604, classified diseases by their symptoms and by findings after death. He was notable for attributing mental illness to natural causes, and he is known for research in ophthalmology, psychiatry and paleopathology. Robert Burton quoted his book often in The Anatomy of Melancholy.