by David King
Indeed, when he arrived in Stockholm, Descartes soon found himself taxed by Queen Christina’s enthusiasm for early-morning lessons in the new thought, and equally burdensome demands to compose ballets for entertainment in the evening. The Frenchman, overworked and exhausted, succumbed to an unusually cold winter in Christina’s unusually cold castle. He died in February 1650, after shivering through five miserable months at court (though his skull, it turned out, stayed in the country almost two hundred years longer; it had been secretly removed and replaced with a substitute, and was not reunited with his body in France until 1821).
It was now Olof Rudbeck’s turn to come to Queen Christina’s court. She was much impressed by his anatomical work and sent an invitation for the student to present his discoveries to her in person. On a beautiful spring day in 1652, Rudbeck arrived at the royal castle in Uppsala.
Set majestically on the highest hilltop, the castle overlooked the town barely a stone’s cast away from the cathedral. Construction of the castle, begun by King Gustav Vasa in the 1540s, was still unfinished. Only two sides of the desired square had been completed, and the surrounding hillside was overgrown with weeds. On the inside, though, the castle was decorated with treasures including paintings, tapestries, statues, and almost anything else of value that Swedish armies could pack up in chests and carry back to the north.
Like many distinguished guests before him, Rudbeck marched up to the castle, climbed the stone steps, and entered the great hall. As the court looked on, the twenty-one-year-old demonstrated his medical discovery. Queen Christina was dazzled. She never had to tap her fan in impatience, or play distractedly with her spaniels. She just sat transfixed on her crimson velvet cushion with eyes aglow at the spectacle. The courtiers saw a new rising star, and the queen did too. By the end of the day she had offered Rudbeck a royal scholarship to continue his studies at Leiden University. He left the castle, his ears ringing with praise and his head spinning with anticipation.
SWEDEN WAS, at this time, one of the most powerful countries in the world. Despite its small population, thinly scattered throughout the kingdom, Sweden had burst upon the scene in 1630, the year of Rudbeck’s birth, with some dazzling victories in the Thirty Years’ War. King Gustavus Adolphus’s army was praised as the best in the world, and his advanced, modernized bureaucracy was, as one observer put it, the envy of France. By the end of the war in 1648, and Rudbeck’s eighteenth birthday, Sweden had emerged with France as the guarantor of Europe’s peace.
Swedish territory then encircled the Baltic Sea and its sweet-smelling pine forests, its flat, marshy heaths, and its foggy pebble beaches. The blue and gold Swedish flag was raised in Finland, northern Germany, the modern Baltic states, and as far away as Cabo Corso on the African Gold Coast. There was even a “New Sweden” confidently planted in America on the Delaware River, including today’s Trenton and Philadelphia.
Rudbeck’s country had never been more powerful or more influential. Exports boomed, and its merchants, at first mostly Dutch immigrants, dominated some of the most lucrative trades of the day. Sweden was Europe’s unrivaled producer of copper and iron, and of the manufactured products that relied on these materials, such as cannon, cannonballs, and lightweight, quick-loading muskets. Lands in its Baltic dominion produced timber, hemp, flax, pitch, and tar, no small advantage in a warlike world just coming to appreciate the advantages of sea power. One Danish historian has compared the Baltic Sea in the seventeenth century to the Persian Gulf in the twentieth: though much of the region was undeveloped and remote, it was the source of scarce raw materials absolutely central to the functioning of the world at the time.
The capital of the kingdom, Stockholm, had grown rich controlling this trade, already boasting a stunning panorama of buildings, bridges, and water that would later earn it the name “Venice of the North.” The docks were bustling, too, with men unloading crates into the warehouses along the seafront. Horses drawing carriages clip-clopped down the cobblestone lanes, passing the fine buildings, the noble estates, and the brick churches with copper spires. Down in the center of the capital, tucked away in the Old Town, stood the Stockholm Banco, preparing, in just a few years, to issue the world’s first modern paper currency. All told, diligence and decadence went together in creating the period Swedish historians call the “Age of Greatness.”
But the small wooden huts clustering in the shadows of the towering mansions were reminders of another side to Sweden’s imperial age. For every laced-up, velvet-clad courtier enjoying Italian perfumes, there were many others who toiled under brutal conditions. As many as 90 percent of the population were peasants, squeezing out a tenuous existence on small homesteads, or bound under steep feudal obligations on large manors. Less fortunate still were the many victims of the recent wars. Armless veterans begged in the streets, and legions of orphans roamed in search of food. In desperation, many women became prostitutes, and some people joined the rogues hiding out in forests, preying upon the secluded roadways.
Olof Rudbeck had grown up in this environment of power and poverty. His home was Västerås, then one of the largest towns in the country, and visibly prospering from the “great quantities of copper and iron, digged [sic] out of the mines.” At the very center stood the cathedral, a restored Gothic structure with a long, tapering spire rising high above its surroundings, and in fact, at that time, the tallest in Sweden. The town also had a castle and even its own curious “wizard” who once, it was said, “made wings and flew, but broke one of his legs.”
Västerås also had Sweden’s first senior high school, founded by Rudbeck’s father, Johannes Rudbeckius, a former field chaplain who had risen to be one of King Gustavus Adolphus’s favorite bishops. He was a man of extraordinary energy and presence, with a high forehead, narrow-set eyes, and a long, thin face that ended in a long white beard. Courageous and stubborn, he was not known for tolerating any nonsense. In the words of one observer, he would rather go to the stake than stand down from his principles.
Clashes between the strict father and the somewhat carefree son were bound to occur. Once, as a young boy, Rudbeck received new dress clothes. They were quite a sight, with cuffs on the arms and shiny new buttons in the front. He had never had clothes like this before, as all his previous garments fastened on the sides with hooks, and the sleeves were slashed rather abruptly. Rudbeck was so pleased that he put them on and paraded around in the courtyard, feeling, as he said, as handsome as the pope in Rome. He played on his toy horse, pretending to be a gallant Spanish cavalryman. His father, however, happened to be looking out the window from his study. He marched outside, pulled out his knife, and cut off all the buttons and cuffs. The boy was immediately sent inside “to sit on his bottom.”
Since no vanity of any form was permitted in the household, Rudbeck was forced to wear his hair short and cropped around the ears in the seventeenth-century equivalent of a bowl cut. This not only was unfashionable but must have made his head seem unusually elongated. Some of the richer, aristocratic schoolboys took to teasing him with the nickname “Olle Bighead.” This was a lasting memory, and he sought solace in biblical reminders about the transitory nature of riches.
The importance of biblical lessons was stressed early and often in Rudbeck’s family. Not only by his father, who had mastered Greek, Latin, and Hebrew, some said, as well as his Swedish, but also by his mother, Malin Rudbeckius, born Magdalena Carlsdotter Hijsing. The daughter of a priest, she organized daily lessons for the family. She had read the Bible cover to cover at least seven times, and impressed many with her memory. Whenever anyone cited a passage, she could usually name its exact location, chapter and verse.
Malin Rudbeckius was actually the bishop’s second wife; he had married her in 1620 after his first wife died. She was quite young, some twenty-two years younger than her husband, making Rudbeck’s mother—eighteen at the time of the wedding—one of the youngest women in Swedish history to be the wife of a bishop. It is hard to believe she gave bir
th to eleven children in only twelve years. Rudbeck was the ninth in the family, and particularly close, it seems, to his mother. Cheerful and merry, with a good sense of humor, she was the “glittering sunshine” of Olof Rudbeck’s childhood.
Some of Rudbeck’s most pleasant memories of his youth probably involved the garden. The bishop was an avid horticulturist, enjoying his summer expeditions into the countryside hunting for wildflowers, and handling each delicate petal with an awe worthy of God’s creation. Rudbeck’s father planted the rosebushes and fruit trees at Västerås high school, and created Sweden’s first teaching garden. It was probably his father’s passion that sparked Rudbeck’s interest in the world of flowers.
Despite the many differences, there is no doubt that Rudbeck loved and respected his parents. Sadly, both passed away too soon, his father dying in 1646, and his mother following three years later. Rudbeck lost his first guardians, teachers, and champions. Neither parent lived to see their son’s triumph, let alone the spectacular discoveries that lay ahead.
2
ORACLE OF THE NORTH
Hide not your Talents they for use were made
What’s a Sun-Dial in the Shade!
—BENJAMIN FRANKLIN
IN THE AUTUMN of 1653, Rudbeck seemed destined for a brilliant career in medicine, and thanks to the queen’s enthusiasm, he would have the chance to study at Leiden University in the Netherlands. This was the Holland of Rembrandt, the Dutch East Indies Company, and the period that historians call its golden age. At this time the Dutch were the world’s foremost merchants, financiers, shippers, and seafarers, as well as its leading anatomists. As Lutheran theologians looked to Wittenberg and Calvinists to Geneva, Leiden was the uncontested center for modern anatomical training.
Once in the town of cobbled lanes and misty canals, Rudbeck allowed his imagination to roam freely. He studied anatomy under the leading authorities, Professors Johannes van Horne and Johannes Antonides van der Linden, admiring the university’s relaxed atmosphere. Leiden’s medical school was remarkably independent of the clergy, the theology department, and the state. What was unthinkable in Sweden regularly happened in Leiden. In the infamous anatomy theater, human bodies were slit open, cut up, and disemboweled before a packed audience.
Rudbeck was soaking up this atmosphere, eager to experience everything that the town had to offer. Even a stroll by the docks could prove instructive. He tended to act on impulse, and became quickly absorbed in new interests. Holland’s long history of fighting to reclaim the land from the sea had given its people talents for constructing all sorts of technical devices, from waterworks to windmills. Feats of Dutch engineering, such as sluices, harbor cranes, and timber saws, thoroughly impressed the visiting Swede.
There was another place Rudbeck came to enjoy: Leiden’s famous botanical garden, founded in 1587 and full of a bewildering variety of rare and exotic plants brought back from Dutch voyages to the East and West Indies. Rudbeck had never seen many of these flowers before. The tulip, for instance, was the reigning “monarch of flowers.” Brought from the frontiers of the Ottoman Empire, its slender stocks exploded into flaming scarlet twirls streaked with the purest white—just one of the seemingly unlimited number of variations that delighted the senses.
In this splendid half-acre retreat, the sweet scents overpowered the stench of the canals, and Rudbeck could hardly contain his excitement. He was learning about new flowers, their ideal growing conditions, and their many uses everywhere from the kitchen to the apothecary. He could also hardly avoid thinking of his father, and how he had lovingly collected flowers for his small teaching garden at Västerås. How Rudbeck must have yearned to share his experience in Leiden among the many beautiful and curious new plants brought back from the other side of the world.
As his stay was winding down, Rudbeck’s anatomical discoveries, and a dispute with an esteemed Danish professor who claimed to have discovered the lymphatic system first, had made his name famous throughout Europe. It seemed that everyone wanted a piece of the promising star, and offers of employment poured in from many places. He was offered the position of field surgeon with the Swedish army, and the prestigious post of city physician in Stockholm, at the heart of the empire. Also, a prominent Swedish count wanted to hire Rudbeck to be his personal engineer, while the Dutch tried to persuade him to stay in the Netherlands. Even the French ambassador approached Rudbeck with a tempting offer to serve the king of France. At only twenty-three years of age, the world beckoned for Olof Rudbeck. But he politely declined the kind offers. For now, he could think of nothing he would rather do than return to Sweden and cultivate a botanical garden of his own.
HAVING ARRANGED FOR some eight hundred new seeds and bulbs to be shipped back from the Netherlands, Rudbeck was ready for what he had come to regard as the “most sweet and innocent” of human pursuits. All he needed was a plot of land. And this brought him in touch with an old acquaintance, Mrs. Helena Gustafsdotter Lohrman.
Five years earlier, when Rudbeck first came to Uppsala, he had rented a room from Mrs. Lohrman, the wife of Uppsala’s mayor, Thomas Lohrman. Not much is known about her other than that she was one of Rudbeck’s early and most significant admirers. When Rudbeck’s mother died in 1649, it was Mrs. Lohrman who generously came to his aid. Rudbeck’s small family inheritance was divided among the many children, and his share was soon gone. Mrs. Lohrman made it possible for Rudbeck to stay in school. It is likely that in return he tutored the Lohrman children, including their precious daughter, Vendela.
Now that Rudbeck was back in town with his bags of seeds, Mrs. Lohrman offered him a small patch of land on the cen-tral Svartbäcksgatan for his garden. There Rudbeck went to work, preparing the beds, scattering the seeds, and, with characteristic vigor, waging war on the weeds. He was also waiting for his professorship, which Queen Christina had earlier offered him.
The problem was, however, that Queen Christina was no longer in a position to make good on her promise. Since Rudbeck’s dissection at the castle, Queen Christina had stunned the world, this time even more than usual. She had converted to Catholicism, renounced the Swedish throne, and moved to Rome, where she allegedly rode into town dressed as an Amazon warrior.
With the queen’s abdication went the generous patronage, the lively court, and, unfortunately for Rudbeck, the many influential courtiers who had known and admired his talents. And so Rudbeck worked and waited, already showing signs of his almost inexhaustible optimism. He passed the time tending to his plants and looking for new specimens for his ever-expanding garden, which he fondly called his “firstborn son.”
Rudbeck’s garden was laid out, like many gardens of the day, in a geometrical pattern, with classical Ionic columns adorning the outer wall. A central gate marked its entrance, and immediately ahead sprinkled the cool waters of a small fountain. Regular, straight lanes divided the garden into symmetrical, boxlike flower beds splashed with shades of amber yellow, bloodred, pure white, and soft orange.
Tradition has it that something else was blossoming in Rudbeck’s fragrant garden. Rudbeck had known Mrs. Lohrman’s daughter, Vendela, for quite a while now, though probably not all that well, as she was only eleven years old when they first met. But now, seven years later, Rudbeck saw a beautiful and refined lady. Mrs. Lohrman had taken up the habit of strolling in the garden, and to Rudbeck’s delight, Vendela accompanied her mother more and more frequently. Perhaps it was here along the perfumed pathways, lined with roses, carnations, and lilies all blooming in their seasons that the two fell in love. With the help of Vendela and his garden, Rudbeck was conquering what could very well have been a long, lonely year of uncertainty.
In the late spring of 1655, Rudbeck was finally offered a position in the medical faculty at Uppsala University. It was only part time and adjunct, and much humbler than any of the offers he had received in the Netherlands, but he was glad nonetheless. Indeed, on the very day of his appointment, Midsummer Eve, Rudbeck married Vendela Lohrman.
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br /> Rudbeck boasted that his botanical garden was the second largest in Europe, surpassed only by Louis XIV’s gardens at Versailles.
Did Vendela know what she was getting herself into? Did she know that sharing her life with Rudbeck would mean sharing his passions? And that this would in turn mean sharing her house with her husband’s stacked paper boxes of seeds, his collection of tobacco pipes, and his indoor gardening ventures, like the cinnamon tree on the ground floor? Did she realize that other rooms in their house would be cluttered with his lutes, paintings, axes, and homemade fireworks?
Almost one year after their wedding, the newlyweds had a terrible scare. Vendela was pregnant with their first child and started experiencing severe pains. Seventeenth-century medicine was, at the best of times, ill equipped to handle unexpected difficulties: primitive anesthetics, crude instruments, and myriad hygienic risks. Women and infants alike died far too often when troubles in childbirth got out of control. For the young couple, too, the situation was critical, and something had to be done.
Although an adjunct professor of medicine, Rudbeck would have had almost no contact with surgery. Nevertheless, he used the skills gained from his many dissections, and performed some sort of surgical maneuver that removed a dangerous obstruction in the birth canal. Older histories called it a Caesarean section, though modern studies have preferred to qualify the position considerably, showing that this was more likely a cutting away of swollen tissue that blocked the opening of the uterus. At any rate, Rudbeck’s operation was a success. Both his wife and son survived, and his contemporaries marveled, ranking it a curiosity of the times. Letters came from France, Germany, and the Royal Society in London requesting further details of the procedure. Rudbeck, it seems, was neither eager to answer their specific questions nor keen to stop the escalating rumors of his medical achievements. Their son was aptly named Johannes Caesar Rudbeck.
