Andrés Laguna

Origins and early life

Andrés Laguna was born around 1511 in the judería of Segovia, the son of Jewish conversos — the Spanish reference sources say so without reserve, and this fiche repeats them; his father was a physician.

Work and career

Trained at Salamanca and at Paris in the new Greek learning, he became one of the great humanist physicians of the sixteenth century: physician to the city of Metz, to the emperor Charles V and to Pope Julius III, who made him a count palatine. His masterpiece was published in Antwerp in 1555: the Castilian translation and commentary of the Materia Medica of Dioscorides, the ancient encyclopedia of medicinal plants, enriched with Laguna's own observations gathered across Europe and illustrated with woodcuts — for two centuries the reference of Spanish pharmacology and botany, reprinted again and again.

He also wrote on anatomy, on the plague, and on the miseries of Europe torn by war, in his Discourse on Europe. He died in 1559 at Guadalajara, on the road home to Segovia, where the Botanical Garden bears his name.