12 Facts About Nicolaes Tulp

Nicolaes Tulp began working in local politics as city treasurer, and in 1622, became a magistrate in Amsterdam.

Nicolaes Tulp drove a small carriage to visit all the patients.

Thanks to his connections on the city council, in 1628 Nicolaes Tulp was appointed Praelector Anatomiae at the Amsterdam Guild of Surgeons.

Nicolaes Tulp's wife died in the same year, leaving him with five young children.

Nicolaes Tulp gathered his doctor and chemist friends together and they wrote the first pharmacopoeia of Amsterdam in 1636 the Pharmacopoea Amstelredamensis.

Since the painting of Nicolaes Tulp's predecessor in 1619, The Osteology Lesson of Dr Sebastiaen Egbertsz was a group portrait around a skeleton, it is clear that the subject of a dead body had set a precedent.

Nicolaes Tulp wrote the first version for his son who had just graduated from Leiden and dedicated the second edition to him after his death.

Some called it the "book of monsters" because Nicolaes Tulp dissected animals brought back from the Dutch East India Company's ships, but because of the fantastic stories that he relates.

Nicolaes Tulp minutely described the condition we know as migraine, the devastating effects of tobacco smoking on the lungs, and reveals an understanding of human psychology in a description of the placebo effect.

Nicolaes Tulp discovered the ileocecal valve at the junction of the large and small intestines, still known as Nicolaes Tulp's valve.

Nicolaes Tulp, impressed by his behaviour, invited Paulus Potter to come to Amsterdam, after a quarrel in the Hague.

In 1673 Nicolaes Tulp was admitted to the Governing Committee of the Republic in The Hague.