Nicolaas Fontanus, eminent Dutch physician

Annabelle Slingerland
Leiden, Netherlands

In the seven provinces of the Dutch Republic, freedom of thought and inquiry thrived in the seventeenth century. The University of Leyden, founded in 1575, embraced medicine and botany, and nurtured literature, poetry, and theatre. It was against this cultural backdrop that Nicolaas Fontanus (Fonteyn) worked as a physician, playwright, and poet. His father, Johannes, and his brother, Bernard, were also respected physicians in Amsterdam.

Nicolaas Fontanus’s contributions to medicine include an early description of amyloidosis. In 1639, he described a young man with jaundice, nosebleeds, and abdominal fluid accumulation. The man’s autopsy revealed an abscess in the liver and “white stone like masses” in the spleen, which he thought resembled the translucent grains of the Sago palm. While these are known today to be protein deposits, his observation still survives in the name “amyloidosis.”

In 1641, called to see a patient dying of angina, Fontanus made a small incision in the trachea and spread the cartilage rings. Previous attempts of this type of procedure were likely unknown to him, such as by sixteenth-century surgeon Ambroise Pare, by the Italian surgeon Antonio Mousa Brasavola in1546, or by French surgeon Nicolas Habicot who performed a “bronchotomy” on a boy who had swallowed golden “pistoles” in an attempt to prevent them from being stolen (1620).

Fontanus wrote a book titled The woman’s doctor, or, An exact and distinct explanation of all such diseases as are peculiar to that sex with choice and experimental remedies against the same: being safe in the composition, pleasant in the use, effectual in the operation, cheap in the price/faithfully translated out of the works of that learned philosopher and eminent position Nicholas Fontanus. The book begins: “You may sooner find your [female] patient dead, than a remedy in the writings of Mercurialis and Mercatus for her recovery, with even Rodericus a Castro correcting their inconvenient quarrel, leaving the women to learned writings rather than useful ones.”

His observations in the book sprang from the sociocultural concepts of the time: “Women are made to stay at home, and to look after Household employments, and because such business is accompanied with much ease, without any vehement stirrings of the body, therefore hath provident Nature assigned them their monthly Courses, that by the benefit of those evacuations, the feculent and corrupt blood might be purified, which otherwise….would turn to rank poyson…like the seed ejaculated out of its proper vessels.” He wrote of the “Matrix” (uterus) communicating with the “Braine” and causing terrible diseases such as “falling Sickness,” “the Palsie,” “the Consumption,” “the Whites,” “the Mother,” “Melancholy,” “Burning Fevers,” and “the Dropsy.” Later chapters included topics on “widows and virgins,” “barrens (no children) vs. fruitful,” and “pregnancy, abortion, lactation.”

In 1640, the city of Amsterdam appointed Fontanus as the Inspector of the College of Medicine, “Inspecteur van het Geneeskundig College.” In 1644, he became physician to Ferdinand, the Archbishop of Cologne. These positions increased both his influence and his publications.

Johannes de Bosch in 1736 created a coat of arms on a wooden panel titled Insignia et Nomina, Inspectorum College Medici Amstelaedamensis, which included many important Dutch physicians such as Nicolaas Fontanus. (Amsterdam Museum, Figure 1).

Acknowledgments

The Rijksmuseum Amsterdam, Study Room Print and Drawings: Meagan Baars, Michael Barg and Team; The City Archives of Amsterdam, Goran Pravilovic and team; KNAW, department of the Humanities, Huygens Institute, Eric van der Linden; Allard Pierson (Museum), University of Amsterdam, curator of manuscripts, Klaas van der Hoek, facilitator Sytse van der Leest, and the Reading Room team.

Hektoen International

Nicolaas Fontanus, eminent Dutch physician

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