Felix Platter was the son of
Protestant humanist, schoolmaster, and printer,
Thomas Platter, and the half-brother of
Thomas Platter the Younger. In 1552, at the age of sixteen, Platter travelled by pony from
Basel to the
University of Montpellier to start a course of study under
Guillaume Rondelet. He lodged in the house of Laurent Catalan, a pharmacist and a
Marrano or Christian Jew. Platter's studies took place against a background of religious persecution; the
French Wars of Religion would start within a decade. Returning to Basel in 1557, Platter was awarded the
medical doctorate by the
University of Basel and established himself as a successful doctor. He became
city physician and a professor of practical medicine. As part of his teaching, he carried out hundreds of
dissections of the human body. In 1602 and 1604, his book
Praxeos (translated into English in the 1660s as
Golden Practice of Physick) gave a rational classification of diseases, based on their symptoms and postmortem findings. During the
plague of 1563-1564 in Basel, Platter stayed to attend the ill while other physicians fled. Four thousand people, a quarter of the city's population, died of the plague. Platter treated plague victims again during the epidemics of 1576, 1582, 1593, and 1609. hypertrophy of the
thalamus, the
broad tapeworm, and
Dupuytren's contracture of the hand. Finally, Platter did important work on ophthalmology. He identified the
retina rather than the
lens as the visual receptor of the eye. He observed congenital
cataracts and was the first to recognize that people who worked near a fire (such as
alchemists) were vulnerable to cataracts, now called
glassblower's cataracts. He had a strong inclination toward music; he played the lute and translated songs into the Basel dialect. His friends in the scholarly world included
Conrad Gessner and
Theodor Zwinger. Platter amassed a famous collection of curiosities at his house, including art, musical instruments, precious stones, and biological specimens. Part of his herbarium is preserved at the
University of Bern, including 813 specimens from Switzerland, France, Italy, Spain, and Egypt.
Michel de Montaigne, on a visit to Basel in 1580, admired Platter's collection: "it was his practice, instead of painting like other botanists the plants according to their natural colors, to glue the same upon paper with so great care and dexterity that the smallest leaves and fibres should be visible, exactly as in nature.... At this house, and in the public school as well, we saw entire skeletons of men." Platter's diary gives a vivid account of his childhood, his life as a medical student at Montpellier, and his travels in France. ==References==