Ole Worm

Ole Worm (13 May 1588 – 31 August 1654), who often went by the Latinized form of his name Olaus Wormius, was a Danish physician, natural historian and antiquary. He was a professor at the University of Copenhagen where he taught Greek, Latin, physics and medicine. Biography Worm was the son of Willum Worm, who served as the mayor of Aarhus, and was made a rich man by an inheritance from his father. Ole Worm's grandfather Johan Worm, a magistrate in Aarhus, was a Lutheran who had fled from Arnhem in Gelderland while it was under Catholic rule. Worm married Dorothea Fincke, the daughter of a friend and colleague, Thomas Fincke. Fincke was a Danish mathematician and physicist, who invented the terms 'tangent' and 'secant' and taught at the University of Copenhagen for more than 60 years. Through Fincke, Worm became connected to the powerful Bartholin family of physicians, and later theologians and scientists, that dominated the University of Copenhagen throughout the 17th and 18th centuries. Ole Worm was something of a perpetual student: after attending the grammar school of Aarhus, he continued his education at the University of Marburg, studying theology in 1605. He received his doctor of medicine degree from the University of Basel in 1611, and received a master of arts degree from the University of Copenhagen in 1617. The rest of his academic career was spent in Copenhagen, where he taught Latin, Greek, physics, and medicine. He was personal physician to King Christian IV of Denmark. Somewhat remarkable for a physician of the time, he remained in the city of Copenhagen to minister to the sick during an epidemic of the bubonic plague, which led to his own death from the plague in 1654.