Jan Jesenius

Jan Jesenius, also written Jessenius (1566 to 1621), was a Bohemian physician, anatomist, politician and philosopher who worked in Prague and became famous for a public dissection of a human body carried out for scientific purposes. From an old noble family originally from the Kingdom of Hungary, he was born in Breslau, where his father had settled as a diplomat, and presented himself in his writings as a Hungarian knight. He studied philosophy and medicine at Wittenberg from 1583 and at Leipzig from 1585, where he dissected a cat under the anatomist Georg Walther, and from 1588 at Padua, where he was taught by Girolamo Fabrizio and defended medical and philosophical theses in 1591. After the Bohemian Revolt he returned to Prague in 1612 and in 1617 was elected rector of Charles University. He was publicly executed after the Battle of White Mountain in 1621.