- First name
- Franciscus
- Last name
- Boë Sylvius, dele
- Date of Birth
- 1614
- Date of Death
- 1672
- Born in
- Hanau
- Died in
- Leiden
Franciscus dele Boë Sylvius (1614–72) taught anatomy and medical practice in Leiden from the late 1640s onwards. A fervent supporter of the theory of the circulation of the blood (1637) propounded by William Harvey and a noted scholar in cerebral anatomy, he attracted many gifted students: Niels Stensen, Lodewijk Meyer, Johannes Bouwmeester and Adriaan Koerbagh. At least one of Sylvius’s early private Leiden lessons on the lymphatic system (1640) was attended by Descartes. Sylvius took turns with Van der Linden for periods of three months (cf. The Letters of Jan Swammerdam, 1975, p. 4). See: Suringar, 1863; NNBW, vol. 8, cols 1290–4; A History of Science in the Netherlands, 1999, pp. 577–9; DSB, vol. 13, pp. 222–3; DDP, vol. 2, pp. 973–5; Huisman, 2009.
Shortly after Sylvius’s death, his name and reputation were used to mask an octavo edition (1673) of TTP (T.3s). the variant T.3s of the third text edition of Tractatus theologico-politicus has the fictitious title Totius medicinae idea nova (A New Concept of All Medicine). The book also presents itself as the second edition of the medical writings of the illustrious Leiden anatomist Franciscus dele Boë Sylvius, ‘a most famous doctor among the Dutch’. The bogus title-page suggests that it even contains a revision by the author himself of the collected works first printed under the same title in Paris in 1671.