ABSTRACT
Caspar Bartholin the elder (1585-1629) went on a peregrinatio medica or foreign medical travel, and gained much medical knowledge, but only ‘at great expense, by continual application, and with frequent peril of his life’. That is how he described how he had acquired the knowledge he was presenting in his 1611 book, Anatomicae Institutiones, or ‘Anatomical basics’ as it might be translated.1 Bartholin came from Copenhagen, and after his peregrinatio medica, he went back to Copenhagen, where he was soon made professor of medicine in the university and taught anatomy. When he recalled his peregrinatio in this way, he was paying tribute to the anatomy teachers whose personal teaching he had experienced and whose published works he had used in his present little book, especially Felix Platter and Caspar Bauhin of the university of Basle, and Hieronymus Fabricius and Julius Casserius of the university of Padua.
