Jan Swammerdam

Jan Swammerdam, who lived from 1637 to 1680, was a Dutch biologist and microscopist, baptized in Amsterdam as the son of an apothecary who collected minerals, coins, fossils and insects. Against his father's wish that he study theology, he began studying medicine at the University of Leiden in 1661 under Johannes van Horne and Franciscus Sylvius, spent a year at the Protestant University of Saumur and then studied in Paris, and received his doctorate in 1667 with a dissertation on the mechanism of respiration. His work on insects, summarised in the Historia insectorum generalis of 1669, showed that egg, larva, pupa and adult are different forms of the same animal and countered the Aristotelian notion that insects were imperfect animals lacking internal anatomy. In 1658 he was the first to observe and describe red blood cells, he carried out experiments on muscle contraction, and with van Horne he researched the anatomy of the uterus. He was one of the first people to use the microscope in dissections, with waxen injection techniques and a single-lens microscope made by Johannes Hudde, and his techniques remained useful for hundreds of years. He died in 1680.