[3] Architecturally, Uppsala University has traditionally had a strong presence in Fjärdingen, the neighbourhood around the cathedral on the western side of the river Fyris.

Uppsala had also long been a hub for regional trade and had contained settlements dating back into the deep Middle Ages.

[10] The turbulent period of the reformation of King Gustavus Vasa resulted in a drop in the already relatively insignificant number of students in Uppsala, which was seen as a centre of Catholicism and potential disloyalty to the Crown.

The Uppsala Synod in 1593 established Lutheran orthodoxy in Sweden, and Charles and the Council of state gave new privileges to the university on 1 August of the same year.

In 1624 the king donated "for all eternity" all his own inherited personal property in the provinces of Uppland and Västmanland, some 300 farms, mills and other sources of income.

The king's former private tutor, Johan Skytte, who was made chancellor of the university in 1622, donated the Skyttean chair in Eloquence and Government which still exists.

During the late 16th and early 17th centuries (and perhaps even earlier), the university was located in the old chapter house parallel to the south side of the cathedral, later renamed the Academia Carolina.

Queen Christina was generous to the university, gave scholarships to Swedish students to study abroad and recruited foreign scholars to Uppsala chairs, among them several from the University of Strasbourg, notably, the philologist Johannes Schefferus (professor Skytteanus), whose little library and museum building at St Eriks torg now belongs to the Royal Society of Sciences in Uppsala.

Rudbeck, one of several sons of Johannes Rudbeckius, a former Uppsala professor who became Bishop of Västerås, was sent for a year to the progressive Leiden University in the Netherlands.

His most significant remaining architectural work is the anatomical theatre, which was added to Gustavianum in the 1660s and crowned with the characteristic cupola for which the building is today known.

A gifted scientist, architect and engineer, Rudbeck was the dominant personality of the university in the late 17th century who laid some of the groundwork for Linnaeus and others, but he is perhaps more known today for the pseudohistorical speculations of his Atlantica, which consumed much of his later life.

A few professional degrees for various purposes were introduced in 1749–1750, but the radical suggestion of binding students to a single program of study adapted to a particular profession was never implemented.

He also modified Gustavianum, designed a new conservatory for Linnaeus' botanical garden and built the new Consistory house, which was to be the administrative core of the university.

With a royal dispensation, she was allowed to enter university in Uppsala in 1872, the year before studies at the Philosophical faculty would actually be made generally available to women.

Other female students of this period include Lydia Wahlström (1869–1954) who later became a noted educator, activist and writer on women's emancipation and suffrage.

Elsa Eschelsson (1861–1911) was the first Swedish woman to finish a law degree and the first to become a "docent," but was not permitted to even hold the position of acting professor despite being formally qualified for this in everything but her sex.

After years of conflicts with the professor of civil law A. O. Winroth, who wrote the paper on "Om tjenstehjonsförhållandet" and with the university board, she died in 1911 from an overdose of sleeping powder.

This was changed in 1925, and the first woman to hold a professorial chair at Uppsala University was Gerd Enequist, appointed professor of human geography in 1949.

Since the last reorganization in 1999, the university has had a separate body called the academic senate, which is a wider, but mostly advisory group representing teaching staff/researchers and students.

[18] The university library holds about 5.25 million volumes of books and periodicals (131,293 shelf meters), 61,959 manuscripts, 7,133 music prints, and 345,734 maps and other graphic documents.

The first clinic with the specific intention to facilitate the practical education of medical students was the Nosocomium Academicum, founded in 1708 and located at the Oxenstierna Palace at Riddartorget beside the cathedral (see illustration above).

The present Akademiska sjukhuset was founded in 1850 as an organizational merger of the county hospital and the university clinic, and a new building was inaugurated in 1867 on the hill below Uppsala Castle to the southeast.

The idea was to invite a distinguished philosopher for a week to give a series of five open lectures unified by a common theme, and provide an opportunity for teachers and students at the Department of Philosophy in Uppsala to meet the guest for informal discussions.

The series was inaugurated in 1971 and named in honor of the former Chair in Practical Philosophy (1911-1933), Axel Hägerström, the founding father of the Uppsala School of ethics and the jurisprudential movement known as Scandinavian Legal Realism.

The list of speakers since then includes several of the most eminent and influential philosophers of the last half century in a broad range of areas of specialization, including Julia Annas, Alonzo Church, Donald Davidson, Peter Geach, Ian Hacking, Christine Korsgaard, Saul Kripke, John McDowell, Martha Nussbaum, Hilary Putnam, Judith Jarvis Thomson, Willard Van Orman Quine, Wlodek Rabinowicz, Amartya Sen, Patrick Suppes, Kendall Walton, Timothy Williamson and Georg Henrik von Wright.

To ease the recruitment of students from the nobility, the university started in the 1630s to offer training in a number of exercitiae or "exercises" (Swedish: exercitier) deemed necessary for the well-rounded education of a young nobleman: riding, fencing, dance, drawing and modern languages such as French and Italian.

These range from Chancellor of the Realm (rikskansler) Johan Oxenstierna (1611–1657) and Lord Chief Justice (riksdrots) Magnus Gabriel De la Gardie (1622–1686) to the first Social Democratic Prime Minister of Sweden, Hjalmar Branting (1860–1925).

Hammarskjöld and Blix both graduated from the Uppsala Faculty of Law, as did the Swedish Minister of Foreign Affairs Anna Lindh, who was assassinated in 2003.

The university played an important role in the Swedish agricultural revolution of the 18th century; Jacob Faggot, the initiator of the reforms, studied at Uppsala.

Specifically, Uppsala University has appeared notably in Män som hatar kvinnor or The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo by Stieg Larsson.