Govert Bidloo

He wrote the libretto for the first-ever Dutch opera, Bacchus, Ceres en Venus (1686) by Johan Schenck.

Born into a Mennonite family of Amsterdam, the son and namesake of a hatter, he was the younger brother of the literary apothecary, Lambert Bidloo (1638-1724), a thorough classicist who saw to it that he had a requisite mastery of Latin as well as Dutch.

In 1688 he became a lecturer of anatomical dissection in The Hague, and in 1690 he was appointed head of the national hospital service, a post he also held in England from 1692.

[1] The atlas was illustrated with 105 plates by Gerard de Lairesse,[2] showing the human figure both in living attitudes and as dissected cadavers.

The book was later plagiarized by English surgeon William Cowper for his Anatomy of the Humane Bodies (1698), which gave no credit to either Bidloo or de Lairesse.