Olaf Rudbeck

 Biography 

Olaf Rudbeck (1630 – 1702) was born in Västerås, Sweden, and lived most of his life in Uppsala. His long, tangential career evades easy categorization. Rudbeck was formally trained as a doctor and during his life (and even today) was perhaps most esteemed for his discovery of the lymphatic system in 1650. However, this major discovery came when Olaf was but a twenty year-old student and only just beginning what would be a controversial fifty year career spanning many disciplines including cartography, botany, geology, architecture, archaeology, music, and history.[1] 

Rudbeck was professor of medicine at Uppsala University in Sweden from 1655 till 1692.[2] His publications include Atlantica, in which he asserts that Sweden is the site of the lost city of Atlantis, and the fully illustrated botanical survey Campus Elysii. Little of Rudbeck’s writing survives today due to a fire that swept through Uppsala in 1702,  though several of his accomplishments endure as beloved city landmarks—including his botanical garden and the cupola of the anatomical theater that he designed and helped construct. 

A Creative Scientist 

Olaf Rudbeck was uncommon in his commitment to ideas (especially his own) and his ability to synthesize from diverse sources while ignoring preconceived notions. Even his detractors had to acknowledge his prowess for innovation and quality of thought, while faulting him for his single-mindedness, impulsiveness, and willful disregard for convention. In some sense Rudbeck’s gift and his downfall was that his logic answered only to his own standards. In the vastness of his own well-informed mind he found all the space and possibilities needed for innovative thought, but perhaps not enough of the critical balance needed to produce work that would stand the test of time. 

Repeatedly the origins of his projects and career tangents began when he encountered an idea, question, or problem that attracted his interest. Rudbeck obsessively pursued his projects to their conclusions, or until he found a better idea to chase. It would be tempting to label him as a dilettante but that his skill in the disparate fields he worked in was so high and his results often so impressive. 

Much of his early success came as a result of his ability to experience life from an unhistorical perspective, as Nietzsche would say.[3] Unhindered by presumptions, Rudbeck’s professional obligation was to knowledge and problem solving rather than fields of study. He was open to inspiration from unlikely sources and seemed to do his best thinking while walking around town. 

A banal stroll through the marketplace resulted in the significant medical discovery that earned him celebrity status throughout Europe as a 20 year-old medical student. Rudbeck paused one day to watch two women butchering a calf and noticed an unfamiliar white fluid leaking from its chest cavity. He immediately asked if he could have a moment to examine and cut on the animal himself. Rudbeck recognized the circulatory and digestive systems from the anatomy drawings he’d studied at school, but could not identify the system that seemed to run alongside the blood vessels and connect to the liver. This was the beginning of his research on the lymphatic system.[4] 

Rudbeck is widely acknowledged as the pioneer of lymphatic research, though he did not technically publish the discovery first. Another doctor published similar findings while Rudbeck lingered on his research, a lesson in promptness that accompanied Rudbeck into his other projects. [5] [6] 

Although unofficial, his discovery and anatomical skillfulness earned him the high praise of the European medical community. Rudbeck couldn’t have cared less about the fame or accolades and ignored all of the prestigious job offers from kings and heads of state around Europe in favor of returning to his hometown and building a garden. And again, it was a walk that inspired this abrupt career shift. 

Dutch sailors had collected botanical samples during their travels and brought them back to their home port of Leiden, where Rudbeck was a student. During a walk through the city’s beautiful grounds Rudbeck saw for the first time 800+ non-native species of plants from around the world, including tulips and daffodils.  

Although a seeming departure from medicine, he approached the project of building his own garden like the scientist he was. He shipped bulbs and seeds back to Sweden and set about growing, drawing and cataloguing them. For many of the species, Rudbeck’s botanical volumes (later published with his son as Campus Elysii) were the first time they’d ever been formally documented.[7] (N.B.: The Rudbeckia plant (aka Black-eyed Susan) would later be named so for Rudbeck and his son for their contributions to botany.[8]) 

These two projects illustrate Rudbeck’s interest in reconciling innovation with scientific method.[9] On the one hand, Rudbeck wandered into ideas and inspirations almost naively, but then applied a rigorous and thorough research process once the project had been undertaken. He also seemed to have a penchant for discovery. Perhaps this was the ambitious standard he set for himself, or perhaps his pioneering tendencies were the result of an unchecked ego.[10] 

It is tempting to infer the latter of Olaf Rudbeck’s character in light of his largest undertaking: a sprawling 3000 page treatise titled Atlantica, in which he attempted to prove that Sweden was not only the cradle of humanity (settled after the flood by the descendants of Noah), but also the site of the lost city of Atlantis. The doctor-turned-historian undertook a 30-year endeavor to uncover Sweden’s proud origins after noting what he thought were striking similarities between ancient Nordic myths and classical Greek myths.[11] 

As with previous work, Rudbeck was consumed by the project; his extensive search for archaeological evidence led him to all corners of Sweden, excavating natural landmarks and studying ancient rune carvings. [12]  Always the innovator, Rudbeck invented a method of dating sites by measuring the depth of undisturbed topsoil.[13] According to his soil measurements, the history of civilized Sweden reached as far back as 2300 BC, making it older than the Olympics—one of the oldest known events in history.[14] 

He seemed poised for a historical breakthrough, but his analytical biases and basic assumptions (that the overlaps in Norse and Greek cultural myths were not accidental, and that myths contained historical truth) would skew his perceptions and taint the credibility of his entire project. To Rudbeck it was so obvious that the two sets of myths were referring to the same places and events that discrepancies were easily dismissed as language imperfections or the result of so much time passing. An example of this fallacy can be found in his explanation of the Hyperboreans. 

Greek mythology describes the Hyperboreans as an attractive, fair-skinned community of giants who lived far to the north (hyper = beyond, borean = north winds). Though considered fiction by most scholars, Rudbeck was determined to prove that the Hyperboreans were real and hailed from Sweden. 

He found his confirmation in the phonetic similarities between the Hyperboreans’ Greek name (pronounced in Greek: hew-per-BOR-eh-oi) and a name he’d found carved in stones in Sweden: Yfwerborne (pronounced ew-ver-BOR-nuh). Rudbeck flippantly reasoned that once one factored in language barriers and pronunciation changes due to time passing, the two names were close enough to be conclusively linked.[15] 

The final (and to Rudbeck’s mind, the biggest) bit of evidence of the Hyperbornean’s Swedish origins came from an old Icelandic poet who wrote of a man named Bore, describing him as “beautiful in appearance, big and powerful”.[16] To Rudbeck this brief description was similar enough to that of the Hyperboreans that it could not be coincidental. Combing through ancient Norse myths he located the Norse god Bore, the first god on Earth and grandfather to Odin. The dramatic conclusion was obvious: the Hyperboreans were the Norse gods and ancient kings, living in Sweden. 

The entire project followed this strange pattern of logic, which when examined as individual points seems almost plausible, but when taken as a whole is imaginative historical fiction at best. The published volumes were popular with the public and considered for a time to be the most important thing ever written, next to the Bible.[17] However, scholars and academics, many of whom were Rudbeck’s colleagues at Uppsala University, harshly rebuffed Rudbeck’s many liberties with his research and his highly selective findings. [18] 

Rudbeck is frequently labeled insane for his obsessive (some say delusional) work on Atlantica, but I think to do so reduces his flawed practice in too-simple terms. Rather than insane, I would suggest that Rudbeck conducted his research with too much confidence in his own mental capacities and perhaps a touch of narcissism. 

Although it is impossible to say so conclusively, one can speculate on other contextualizing factors that may have contributed to Rudbeck crossing the fine line between independent, innovative thought and circular, self-serving logic. To my mind the largest factor in the failure of this work was Rudbeck’s growing paranoia and the resulting withdrawal from the world that had nurtured his intellectual creativity for his entire career. By the time Rudbeck began writing Atlantica he was a fairly unpopular man with shrinking political (and financial) connections during politically tumultuous times.[19] He even wrote on a number of occasions that he felt physically in danger, though it’s difficult to know how real the threat was.[20] 

During the thirty year process of writing he became ever more reclusive, keeping a limited company of people who were similarly aligned with his eccentricities. Instead of engaging critics in an academic debate about the flaws in his work as he might have as a younger man, Rudbeck insulated his ideas with more self-serving evidence and dismissed even greater chunks of contradictory data.[21] 

As he got older and more mistrustful the line that had kept him connected to a critical intellectual community was severed and he was sent a drift in the circular sea of his own logic. Still, three hundred years after Rudbeck’s death many of his early contributions to science remain profound, while his work of nationalistic fiction has become almost as mythical as the lost city it was based on. 

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[1] King, David. Finding Atlantis: A True Story of Genius, Madness, and an Extraordinary Quest for a Lost  

World. (Harmony Books, New York, 2005), 9, 22-23, 30, 39-41. 

[2]Uppsala University, “Olaf Rudbeck”, available at: http://www.uu.se/en/node125. 

[3]Nietzsche, Friederich. “On the Uses and Disadvantages of History for Life.”  Untimely Meditations. Trans. R.J. Hollingdale. (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge UP, 1983), 62. 

[4] King, David. Finding Atlantis: A True Story of Genius, Madness, and an Extraordinary Quest for a Lost  

World. (Harmony Books, New York, 2005), 10-11. 

[5]Cell Immunology Journal. “Immunology’s first priority dispute–an account of the 17th-century Rudbeck-Bartholin feud. “ 2006 Jul;242(1): 1-8. Epub: 2006 Nov 2; available at 

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/17083923?itool=EntrezSystem2.PEntrez.Pubmed.Pubmed_ResultsPanel.Pubmed_RVDocSum&ordinalpos=3 

[6]Scandinavian Journal of Immunology. “Rudbeck’s complaint: a 17th-century Latin letter relating to basic immunology.” 2007 Oct; 66(4): 486-93. available at: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/17850595?ordinalpos=1&itool=EntrezSystem2.PEntrez.Pubmed.Pubmed_ResultsPanel.Pubmed_SingleItemSupl.Pubmed_Discovery_RA&linkpos=3&log$=relatedarticles&logdbfrom=pubmed 

[7] King, 18-21. 

[8]The National Garden Bureau. “Fact Sheets: Rudbeckia”; available at http://www.ngb.org/gardening/fact_sheets/fact_details.cfm?factID=23 

[9] King, 253. 

[10] King, 223-224, 254. 

[11]King, 30-31, 60-64. Among his many assertions, Rudbeck identified Swedes as the Hyperboreans of Greek mythology and reasoned that Sweden was the only logical place for Noah to settle after the great flood because of its vast natural resources like fish.  

[12] King, 110-120. 

[13]King, 55-58. Modern archaeologists refined some of Rudbeck’s methods and today the science of stratigraphy is a valued method for dating artifacts by soil strata. 

[14] King, 59. 

[15]King, 72-75. Rudbeck wrote, “It often happens that when one people hears the name of another people, and cannot determine its meaning, they willingly interpret it according to their own language.” (73) 

[16]King, 74. Rudbeck was referring to Snorri Sturlson’s Edda. 

[17]King, 204-208, 223-224. (NB: Interestingly, Atlantica would resurface as an important text in the development of Nazis propaganda in the early 20^thcentury: http://pseudoarchaeology.org/a10-ward.html) 

[18]One of his biggest critics, Claes Arrhenius, described Atlantica as “a cloud castle of hypotheses”. (87) 

[19] King, 42-54, 213-217. 

[20]King, 47. One of Rudbeck’s enemies, Law Kakan Fegraeus, was rumored to carry a pistol in the event that he have opportunity to kill Rudbeck. 

[21]King, 254. “Nothing stood in [Rudbeck’s] way, at least not for long. And that, essentially is one of the main problems with his work. He had very little sense of limit and virtually no ability to accept a fact that conflicted with his theory. Rudbeck was very much the victim of his own problem-solving talent.”