ABSTRACT
The physician Hippolytus Guarinonius wrote at least 15 works in German, eight in Latin, and one in a mixture of German, Latin and Italian, of which eight were published and the rest are known only in manuscript.1 None of his major writings are yet translated outside these languages, and unlike the Platter brothers, he is little known beyond German-or Italian-speaking Europe. The illegitimate son of north Italian Catharina Pellegrini and Bartolomeo Guarinonius,2 he was born in Trent in the South Tirolean Alps. In the Catholic Etschtal region between Trent and Bolzano, then as now largely bilingual in German and Italian, the wealthy Guarinonius family owned extensive vineyards. Shortly after his birth on 18 November 1571, his father, the son of a physician and grandson of a goldsmith, was called to Vienna to take up an appointment as court physician to Emperor Maximilian II. Hippolytus’s younger half-brother Bartolomeus Guarinonius was ‘Doctor of medicine in Schwaz’ to at least 1659, and another half-brother, Johann Andreas Guarinonius, was a courtier in Graz, to Emperor Ferdinand II (Diagram 2).3 The now discredited suggestion that Hippolytus served as a pageboy at Cardinal Carlo Borromeo’s court in Milan is unsupported in his publications. Their autobiographical passages do, however, refer occasionally to Vienna and Trent, and frequently to Prague and Padua. By his own account, Guarinonius spent the first 11 years of his life in Vienna, where he had a tutor, and in 1583 followed his father, by now serving as physician to Emperor Rudolf II, to Prague, where he spent 11 years as one of around 150 boarding scholars at Prague’s Jesuit College in preparation for his medical studies at the University of Padua .4
