Pietro Andrea Mattioli

Pietro Andrea Mattioli (1501 to about 1578) was a physician and naturalist born in Siena, the son of a physician, in a family of thirteen children. He received his medical degree at the University of Padua in 1523 and practiced in Siena, Rome, Trento and Gorizia, serving as court physician to Bernardo Cles and later as personal physician to Ferdinand II, Archduke of Further Austria, and to the Holy Roman Emperor Maximilian II. His most important work was a commentary on the medicinal plants described by Dioscorides, first published in Italian in 1544 and in Latin in 1554, which went into thirteen editions in his lifetime and was translated into French, Czech and German. He described around 100 new plants, and the high quality of its woodcuts let readers recognize plants even when the text was obscure. By adding plants with no known medical use he helped move botany from a branch of medicine toward a field of interest in its own right. He also described the use of mercury against syphilis and recorded what is called the first case of cat allergy.