Joachim Camerarius the Younger

Joachim Camerarius the Younger (1534 to 1598), whose German surname form was Kammermeister, was a German physician, botanist, zoologist and humanist scholar. Born in Nuremberg, the son of the famed humanist Joachim Camerarius the Elder, he met many leading figures of the later sixteenth century through his father's friends, among them Philip Melanchthon and Johannes Crato von Krafftheim. After early studies at Wittenberg and Leipzig he turned to medicine under Crato, studied at the University of Padua and took his doctorate at the University of Bologna in 1562. He then returned to Nuremberg to practise, and when the city council founded the Collegium Medicum in 1592 he served as dean of the medical college until his death. He corresponded with Gaspard Bauhin, Carolus Clusius, Thomas Erastus and Konrad Gessner. Trained in the strict Galenic school, he also showed the naturalistic leanings of Gessner and Pietro Andrea Mattioli. His works include a commentary synopsis on plague of 1583, the Hortus Medicus et Philosophicus of 1598 and the emblem books Symbola et emblemata, and he published a very popular edition of Mattioli's commentaries on Dioscorides, the Kreutterbuch, in 1586.