Nicolaes Tulp

He was born in Amsterdam on 9 October 1593 as Claes Pieterszoon. As an ambitious young man he chose the tulip as his emblem and changed his name to the grander Nicolaes Tulp ("tulp" is Dutch for tulip). The flower appeared on his house and his carriage.

The anatomy lesson

Tulp studied medicine in Leiden from 1611 and took his doctorate in 1614. From 1628 he was the official lecturer in anatomy for Amsterdam's guild of surgeons, giving lessons in the Waag, the old weigh house, where the bodies of executed criminals were dissected. On 16 January 1632 he dissected Aris Kindt, a thief from Leiden who had been hanged in Amsterdam. The young Rembrandt, newly arrived in the city, was commissioned to paint the scene. The Anatomy Lesson of Dr Nicolaes Tulp now hangs in the Mauritshuis in The Hague. Tulp is the only man wearing a hat, a sign that he is the most important figure.

He was an innovative doctor. After the plague of 1635 he and colleagues wrote Amsterdam's first official guide for pharmacists (1636), to stop the sale of overpriced fake cures. His Observationes Medicae (1641) described 231 cases, including the effects of tobacco on the lungs, and the story of the blacksmith Jan de Doot, who cut a bladder stone out of his own body and survived. Tulp is said to have been the first Amsterdam doctor to visit patients by carriage.

City father

Alongside his practice, Tulp served the city for decades, including as magistrate and treasurer. In 1654 he was first chosen as one of the city's four burgomasters. A print in the Rijksmuseum calls him "four times burgomaster and fifty years a councillor of Amsterdam". His daughter Margaretha married Jan Six, Rembrandt's friend, who became burgomaster himself in 1691.

Tulp died in The Hague on 12 September 1674, aged 80, and was buried in the Nieuwe Kerk in Amsterdam.