Felix Platter

Felix Platter (1536 to 1614), also written Plater or Latinized as Platerus, was a Swiss physician, botanist and diarist, known for research in several areas of medicine including ophthalmology, psychiatry and paleopathology. He was the son of the humanist, schoolmaster and printer Thomas Platter and half-brother of Thomas Platter the Younger. At sixteen he rode from Basel to Montpellier to study under Guillaume Rondelet, lodging with the pharmacist Laurent Catalan. After returning to Basel in 1557 he took the medical doctorate, became a successful doctor, city physician and professor of practical medicine, and carried out hundreds of dissections as part of his teaching. His book Praxeos of 1602 and 1604 gave a rational classification of diseases by symptoms and postmortem findings and attributed mental illness to natural causes, though it still allowed for an evil spirit.