Theodor Zwinger the Elder (2 August 1533 – 10 March 1588) was a Swiss physician and Renaissance humanist scholar.

After Zwinger's father's death, Christina married the noted humanist Conrad Lycosthenes (Wolffhart).

The work is considered "perhaps the most comprehensive collection of knowledge to be compiled by a single individual in the early modern period.

"[8] He was able to draw on the knowledge base of his stepfather Conrad Lycosthenes in compiling the Theatrum Humanae Vitae.

These two works "may fairly be described as the early modern ancestors of the great dictionnaire raisonné of the eighteenth-century Enlightenment, the Encyclopédie of Diderot.