Daniel Sennert

Daniel Sennert (1572 to 1637) was a German physician and a prolific academic writer, especially in the field of alchemy or chemistry. Born in Breslau, now Wrocław in Poland, the son of a shoemaker, he attended the University of Wittenberg, took his master's degree in 1598 and his medical degree in 1601, and served on its faculty for the rest of his life, six times as dean of the medical faculty. He also served as physician to aristocrats and rulers, among them John George I, Elector of Saxony. Within a decade of his medical degree he moved from avoiding alchemical theory to accepting alchemical transmutation and experiment as valid, and he published popular books on alchemy and chemistry. He is notable for an early version of atomic theory that forms a bridge between Geber and the corpuscularians such as Robert Boyle, and he gave one of the earliest accounts of scarlatina. He died of the plague in Wittenberg in 1637.