BOERHAAVE, HERMANN, one of the most celebrated physicians of modern times, was born at Woerhout near Leyden, December 31, 1668. Destined for the clerical profession, to which his father belonged, he received a liberal education, and early displayed unusual abilities. At the age of sixteen he entered the university of Leyden, where he studied under Gronovius, Ryckius, Trigland, and other distinguished men, and obtained the highest academic honours. In 1690 he took his degree in philosophy; on which occasion he delivered an inaugural dissertation De distinctione mentis à corpore, in which he attacked the doctrines of Epicurus, Hobbs, and Spinoza. Being left, on the death of his father, without any provision, he was compelled to support himself by teaching mathematics. By the advice of Vandenberg, the burgomaster of Leyden, Boerhaave now applied himself with ardour to the study of medicine, to which indeed he had early manifested a decided inclination. The works of Hippocrates among the ancients, and those of Sydenham among the moderns, were the especial objects of his study; but his reading was by no means confined to these authors. In 1693 he took his degree of M.D. at Harderwyck in Guelderland, and immediately entered on the duties of his profession. His merits soon became conspicuous; and in 1701 he was appointed by the university of Leyden to supply the place of Drelincourt as lecturer on the institutes of medicine. His inaugural discourse on this occasion was entitled De commendando Hippocratis studio, in which he recommended to his pupils that great physician as their model. In 1709, the university rewarded his distinguished merit by appointing him successor to Hotton in the chair of botany and medicine, in which capacity Boerhaave did great service, not only to his own university, but also to botanical science, by his improvements and additions to the botanic garden of Leyden, and by the publication of numerous works descriptive of new species of plants. He was appointed in 1714 rector of the university. In the same year he succeeded Bidloo in the chair of practical medicine, and in this capacity he had the merit of introducing into modern practice the system of clinical instruction. Four years later he was appointed to the chair of chemistry, and delivered an inaugural discourse, which contains the germs of his celebrated Elements of Chemistry. In 1728 he was elected into the Royal Academy of Sciences of Paris, and two years later into the Royal Society of London; to both of which he communicated his chemical researches. In 1729 declining health obliged him to resign the chairs of chemistry and botany; and in 1731 he resigned the rectorship of the university, to which office he had been re-elected. On this occasion he delivered a discourse De Honore Medici Servitute. This great and good man died, after a lingering and painful illness, which he bore with Christian patience and firmness, on the morning of the 23d September 1738. His funeral oration was delivered by his pious and learned friend the Rev. Mr. Schultens.
From the time of Hippocrates, no physician had more justly merited the esteem of his contemporaries, and the admiration of posterity, than Boerhaave. To uncommon intellectual abilities he united those amiable qualities of the heart which give them so great a value to society. His personal appearance was simple and venerable. He taught very methodically, and with great precision; his style was eloquent, and his delivery dignified and graceful. He sometimes also gave his lectures a lively turn; but his railing was never coarse or satirical. He possessed remarkable powers of memory, and was an accomplished linguist.
A declared foe to all excess, he considered decent mirth as the salt of life. He was fond of music, with which he had a scientific acquaintance; and during winter he had a weekly concert in his house. It was his daily practice throughout life, as soon as he rose in the morning, which was generally very early, to retire for an hour to private prayer, and meditation on some part of the Scriptures. He often told his friends, when they asked him how it was possible for him to go through so much fatigue, that it was this practice which gave him spirit and vigour in the business of the day.
Of his sagacity, and the wonderful penetration with which he often discovered and described, at first sight, such dispositions as betray themselves by no symptoms to common eyes, very surprising accounts have been transmitted to us. Yet so far was he from having presumptuous confidence in his own abilities, or from being puffed up by prosperity, that he was condescending to all, and remarkably diligent in his profession; he used often to observe that the life of a patient, if trifled with or neglected, would one day be required at the hand of the physician. He used to say that the poor were his best patients, because God was their paymaster. His benevolence, however, was exercised with discrimination. The activity of his mind sparkled visibly in his eyes. He was always cheerful, and desirous of promoting every valuable end of conversation, of which the excellency of the Christian religion was frequently the subject. He never regarded calumny nor detraction,—for even he had his enemies,—nor in any instance thought it necessary to confute them. "They are sparks," said he, "which, if you do not blow them, will go out of themselves. The surest remedy against scandal, is to live it down by a perseverance in well-doing; and by praying to God that he would cure the dis-tempered minds of those who traduce and injure us." His great skill and celebrity as a physician brought him a large fortune. He left his only surviving daughter two millions of florins.
The genius of Boerhaave raised the fame of the university of Leyden, especially as a school of medicine, so as to make it a resort of strangers from every part of Europe. All the princes of Europe sent him disciples, who found in this skilful professor not only an indefatigable teacher, but an affectionate guardian. When Peter the Great went to Holland in 1715, to instruct himself in maritime affairs, he also took lessons from Boerhaave. The reputation of this eminent man was not confined to Europe; a Chinese mandarin wrote him a letter directed "To the illustrious Boerhaave, physician in Europe;" and it reached him in due course. The city of Leyden raised a splendid monument to his memory in the church of St Peter, inscribed "To the salutary genius of Boerhaave," SALUTIFERO BOERHAAVII GENIO SACRUM.
When Boerhaave first directed his attention to medicine, the philosophical reform inaugurated by Bacon had given a powerful impulse to the physical sciences; and these, accordingly, occupied all minds, whilst the healing art had but little profited in consequence. It was overlooked or forgotten that, from its very origin, Hippocrates had applied to it the experimental philosophy with which the learned were now everywhere so enthusiastically occupied. His theory, however, still continued to fluctuate between several dogmas equally remote from the truth. The chemists who, at the revival of learning in Europe, had overturned the authority of Galen, had to defend themselves against the sects of the mechanicians, and of Bellini, which divided the dominion of medicine between them. In a small portion of Germany alone Stahl brought back men's minds to the judicious doctrine of Hippocrates, attributing all the movements in the animal economy to a force inherent in itself, and different from the general forces of matter; but in adopting a word, the meaning of which was by no means precise, he rendered less general and less salutary the influence which he would otherwise have produced. The first perusal of Hippocrates
Boëthius. appeared to have carried away Boerhaave; but this physician, endowed by nature with a mind fitted for analysis, comparison, and combination, rather than with a creative and inventive genius, was unable to resist the influence of his age, and above all, the effect of his early studies. Having been a mathematician and natural philosopher before he became physician, he was constantly carried away by the first objects of his labour and research; and being more capable than any one else of detecting the accessory affinities between these sciences and that of man, he ran greater risk of being seduced by them. But as every system, however vicious, has always, along with the facts which it arranges and offers to explain, a point of accordance more or less remote, he thought that the best medical system would be that which should unite and combine all opinions. Forgetting that living bodies are free during their life from those movements to which other bodies are imperiously constrained, or at least counterbalance them, and that all the acts which they perform are the result of an activity which is peculiar to them; overlooking, also, that those movements of the living economy which most easily admit an application of the laws of physics and mechanics, have, nevertheless, as a primum mobile, the force of life, and only receive from the forces of dead matter an accessory impulse; Boerhaave wished to combine in one and the same theory the vital philosophy of Hippocrates, the chemical principles of Sylvius, the mechanism of Bellini, and many other incongruities besides: attributing more, however, to the mechanical and chemical forces, which can never be but accessory, than to the more profound and secret powers of life, which are the principal. Thus the calibre of the vessels adjusted to the dimensions of the globules composing the liquids of the body, formed, according to him, the hydraulic relation on which depended the circulation of the humours, their separation from the blood in the different secretory organs, the morbid congestion of the blood in various fluxions, in humours, inflammations, and such like; and hence he concluded that all the efforts of the physician should be directed to establish this relation, or rather mechanical equilibrium. Nor did he stop even here. To the mechanical hypotheses just mentioned he added others founded on chemical principles, when, in attempting to explain the causes and the phenomena of diseases, he admitted the formation of pretended acrimonies in the blood, which the physician ought, according to him, to have constantly in view in order to neutralize them; acrimonies which were long famous in the language of the schools, and which are still found in that of ordinary life. The whole phenomena of diseases, with the spontaneous evacuations by which they are terminated, and which constitute the crises, find a ready explanation on this vicious system, which seems to offer a reason, when it only mystifies with a word, involving a gratuitous hypothesis. In practice, however, theory receives many modifications; and there can be little doubt, that in prescribing for patients, Boerhaave was more guided by experience and good sense than by the strangely eclectic doctrine to which we have here cursorily alluded.
The principal works of this illustrious physician are, 1. Institutiones Medicæ, Lugd. Bat., 1708; 2. Aphorismi de cognoscendis et curandis Morbis, Lugd. Bat., 1709. On this work, which was the text book of Boerhaave's lectures, Van Swieten published a commentary in 5 vols. 4to; 3. Libellus de Materia Medica, et Remedium Formulis quæ scribunt Aphorismus, Lugd. Bat., 1719. 4. Institutiones et Experimenta Chæmicæ, Paris, 1724.