John Caius

John Caius (1510 to 1573), born John Kays, was an English physician and the second founder of Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge. Born in Norwich, he studied at Gonville Hall, then went to Padua, where he learned from Montanus and Vesalius and took his degree as a physician in 1541. Back in London he became a fellow of the College of Physicians and was its president nine times, leaving a manuscript account of its first decades. In 1551 he attended an outbreak of sweating sickness at Shrewsbury and published A Boke or Counseill Against the Disease Commonly Called the Sweate in 1552, which became the main source on the illness, now thought to have been influenza. He served Edward VI, Mary and Elizabeth as physician until his Catholicism cost him the post in 1568. In 1557 he refounded his old college, and in 1564 secured the bodies of two executed criminals each year for dissection there. He was also an early naturalist who made his own observations of animals.