, originally a city gate, later used as a
weigh house and
guildhall. Both the Guild of Surgeons and the Amsterdam
Guild of Saint Luke met upstairs, where Rembrandt's
Anatomy lesson hung for centuries. The career of Tulp matched the success of Amsterdam. As the population of Amsterdam grew from 30,000 in 1580 to 210,000 in 1650, Tulp's career as a doctor and politician made him a man of influence. He drove a small carriage to visit his patients. Thanks to his connections on the city council, in 1628 Tulp was appointed
Praelector Anatomiae at the Amsterdam Guild of Surgeons. His wife died in the same year, leaving him with five young children. In 1630 he married his second wife, the daughter of the mayor of Outshoorn. They had three children. It was Tulp who examined and signed the fitness reports for the first Dutch settlers on the island of
Manhattan, and his signature was found on these in the long-lost archives of the Dutch settlement uncovered in the 1980s in the basement of the New York public library. In his position, Tulp was responsible for inspections of
apothecary shops. Amsterdam chemists had access to enormous quantities of herbs and spices from the Far East, thanks to newly established shipping routes. The apothecary business flourished – by 1636 there were 66 shops in Amsterdam. Appalled by the exorbitant prices charged for useless medicines against the plague (Amsterdam was severely hit by the
plague in 1635), Tulp took action. With his doctor and chemist friends, he wrote the first
pharmacopoeia of Amsterdam in 1636, the
Pharmacopoea Amstelredamensis. Chemists who wanted to set up shop in Amsterdam were required to pass an exam based on this book. The publication was a groundbreaking work that served as an example for other cities of Holland.
Rembrandt's painting The praelector would give yearly
anatomy lessons each winter, performing them on victims of
public hanging. At that time the
dissection of bodies was only legal if the subject was a male criminal and considered outside of the Church. The dissections were performed with the consent of the city council and were a means to collect funds for city council meetings and dinners. All council and guild members were required to attend and pay an admission fee. Throughout Europe, these dissections were attended by prominent learned men, who exchanged ideas about anatomy and the chemical processes of the human body. As befits a new praelector, the Guild commissioned a new group portrait of the prominent councilmen and guild masters.
Rembrandt, himself a young man of 26 and new to the city, won this commission and made a famous painting of him:
The Anatomy Lesson of Dr Nicolaes Tulp. This painting, which now hangs in the
Mauritshuis museum of
the Hague, depicts Tulp dissecting such a criminal's
forearm. There has been much speculation as to why the dissection began on the forearm. '' by
Rembrandt Rembrandt's event depicted in the painting can be dated to 16 January 1632; the Amsterdam Guild of Surgeons, of which Tulp was official City Anatomist, permitted only one public dissection a year and the body would have to be that of an executed criminal. The criminal is identified as the robber Aris Kindt. Rembrandt would later make a painting of Tulp's successor in 1656
The Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Jan Deijman. Since the painting of Tulp's predecessor in 1619,
The Osteology Lesson of Dr. Sebastiaen Egbertsz was a group portrait around a skeleton, it is clear that the subject of a dead body had set a precedent. It would be another 100 years before the surgeons were allowed to dissect a female cadaver.
"Medical observations" His most impressive work on medicine was his
Observationes Medicae, published in 1641 and again in 1652 by
Lodewijk Elzevir. He wrote the first version for his son who had just graduated from Leiden and dedicated the second edition to him after his death. The book comprises minute descriptions of his work, including 231 cases of disease and death. Some called it the "book of monsters" because Tulp dissected animals brought back from the
Dutch East India Company's ships, but also because of the fantastic stories that he relates. An example;
Jan de Doot, a
blacksmith in Amsterdam, was in such pain from a
bladder stone, that he sharpened a knife and removed it himself because he refused to be the victim of the 'stone cutters'. These were the
barber-surgeons who performed such procedures but had a high death rate. To everyone's surprise, Jan de Doot survived this operation which was said to produce a stone the size of an egg. A painting illustrating this story is in the collection of the Anatomy Museum of Leiden. Tulp minutely described the condition we know as
migraine, the devastating effects of
tobacco smoking on the lungs, and reveals an understanding of human psychology in a description of the
placebo effect. Tulp also discovered the
ileocecal valve at the junction of the large and small intestines, still known as '''Tulp's valve'''. While Tulp made observations of various diseases, treatment often continued in the age-old way. His description of the symptoms of
Beriberi in a Dutch seaman, for example, went unnoticed until the cause (
vitamin B1 deficiency) was recognized two hundred years later by
Christiaan Eijkman. ==Public office==