[Vopiscus Fortunatus Plempius]

Born in Amsterdam in 1601, Plempius studied at Louvain, Leiden & Padua where he obtained a doctorate in medicine in 1623. He was appointed Professor at Louvain in 1633 and died there in 1671 after a brilliant academic & scientific career. He spent thirty years of his life working on a translation into Latin of the Arabic text of the first 2 books of Avicenna's treatise "The Canon", as well as of the chapter in book 4 dealing with fevers. The book was published by Nempaeus in Louvain in 1658. For many years, Plempius used it as a reference manual for medical students. In writing this book, Plempius made use of an Arabic manuscript made available to him by an old acquaintance of his from Leiden, J. Golius who, in the course of his diplomatic career in the Orient, had collected hundreds of Arabic manuscripts (currently held by the University Library of Leiden and the Bodleian at Oxford). Through the example of Plempius, the Arab contribution to the European medical humanism of the XVIIth century will be analyzed.