Ole Worm - Life

Life

Worm was the son of Willum Worm who served as the mayor of Aarhus, and was made a rich man by the inheritance from his father. Ole Worm's grandfather Johan Worm, a magistrate in Aarhus, was a Lutheran who had fled from Arnhem in Gelderland while it was under Catholic rule. He married Dorothea Fincke, the daughter of a friend and colleague, Thomas Fincke, a mathematician who invented the terms 'tangent' and 'secant'.

Ole Worm was something of a perpetual student: after attending the grammar school of Aarhus, he continued his education at the University of Marburg in 1605, received his Doctor of Medicine degree from the University of Basel in 1611, and received a Master of Arts degree from the University of Copenhagen in 1617. The rest of his academic career was spent in Copenhagen, where he taught Latin, Greek, physics, and medicine. He was personal physician to King Christian IV of Denmark. Somewhat remarkable for a physician of the time, he remained in the city of Copenhagen to minister to the sick during an epidemic of the Black Death.

Read more about this topic:  Ole Worm

Famous quotes containing the word life:

    My dream of politics all my life has been that it is the common business, that it is something we owe to each other to understand and ... discuss with absolute frankness.
    Woodrow Wilson (1856–1924)

    O gentlemen, the time of life is short!
    To spend that shortness basely were too long.
    William Shakespeare (1564–1616)

    The great problem of American life [is] the riddle of authority: the difficulty of finding a way, within a liberal and individualistic social order, of living in harmonious and consecrated submission to something larger than oneself.... A yearning for self-transcendence and submission to authority [is] as deeply rooted as the lure of individual liberation.
    Wilfred M. McClay, educator, author. The Masterless: Self and Society in Modern America, p. 4, University of North Carolina Press (1994)