ABSTRACT
In 1673 one of the most learned and respected physicians of Europe, Thomas Bartholin, published a medical treatise defending an unorthodox type of healing, known to his contemporaries as transplantation. Bartholin has not escaped the notice of historians of medicine, who have long recognized him as an outstanding anatomist and physiologist of the Scientific Revolution. The physicians' ready endorsement of this new therapy, which seems bewildering to our modern eyes, reflects in part the widespread zeal to reform and to expand the traditional canon of medicine. The German physician and botanist Simon Paulli had joined Bartholin in his paean to the virtues of folk medicines based on backyard –and barnyard – plant and animal products. Medical treatises discussing transplantation remind the historian that early modern peoples lived in close contact with animals. It is easy for modern scholars to forget just how frequently and how closely peoples of the pre-modern world interacted with animals.
