Joachim Camerarius the Younger

The younger Camerarius’s association with the luminaries of later sixteenth-century German intelligentsia was secured by his father’s network of influential friends—including Philip Melanchthon and Johannes Crato von Krafftheim.

After his early studies at Wittenberg and Leipzig, Camerarius turned to medical pursuits under the tutelage of Crato.

Though trained in the strict Galenic school of philosophically based medicine, Camerarius also displayed the naturalistic proclivity of his exemplars Gessner and Pietro Andrea Mattioli.

His works include a Synopsis [...] commentariorum de peste (which includes his own De recta et necessaria ratione, praeservandi a pestis contagio) (Nuremberg, 1583), Hortus Medicus et Philosophicus (Frankfurt/M., 1598) and Symbola et emblemata (Centuria, I: 1590, II: 1595, III :1596, IV: 1604; ed.

His son Ludwig Camerarius (1573–1651) brought out a posthumous edition of this work that added a fourth “century” of symbols and emblems drawn from aquatic animals and reptiles to the three previously published “centuries” taken from herbs and plants, four-legged animals, and birds and insects.