„Freundtschafft die auch nach dem Tod wart”
‘Freundtschafft die auch nach dem Tod wärt’

Daniel Gödtke, Gerard Blaes and zootomy

Summary/Abstract: The case study article aims to reconstruct the biography of Daniel Gödtke (1640/41 – after 1674), a doctor of philosophy and medicine from Gdansk and to analyse the specific nature and scope of his studies in the United Provinces of the Netherlands, so that it can be explained what impact study visits in academic centres had on students from the semiperipheral European countries. The article makes use of the inductive, philological, genealogical and comparative methods; evidential paradigm was also used. In the 1650s, 1660s and 1670s, the inhabitants of Royal Prussia willingly took up medical studies at Dutch universities and studied in academic gymnasia there. Leiden, Amsterdam and other places in the Northern Netherlands, which were home for famous anatomists, surgeons, lithotomists, chymiatrists, collectors and botanists, were also important stops en route of young students of ars medica from the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, mainly Protestants, who later became graduates of French, Swiss or German universities. Daniel Gödtke, the half-brother of the painter Daniel Schultz the Younger, was one of the seventeenth-century doctors of philosophy and medicine from Gdansk who has been forgotten by contemporary history. He studied at the University of Leiden and the Athenaeum Illustre of Amsterdam, and in 1671 graduated from the University of Harderwijk; his inaugural dispute focused on practical medicine. His most influential teacher during his stay in the Northern Netherlands was Gerard Blaes, a famous anatomist and chymiatrist, who supervised Gödtke when he conducted his zootomy research. The cooperation between the student and the master resulted in two exercitii gratia disputes presented by Gödtke in Amsterdam in 1666, as well as two volumes of anatomical observations conducted by the collegium privatum Amstelodamense (1667 and 1674), where Gödtke was a member and a participant. The promising scientific career of Gödtke was interrupted before his return to his hometown, most probably due to his premature death.

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