Theodor Zwinger
Swiss physician (1533-1588)
Theodor Zwinger the Elder (Swiss Standard German: [ˈt͡svɪŋər]; 2 August 1533 – 10 March 1588) was a Swiss physician and Renaissance humanist scholar. He made significant contributions to the emerging genres of reference and travel literature. He was the first distinguished representative of a prominent Basel academic family.
Life and work
Zwinger was the son of Leonhard Zwinger, a furrier who had become a citizen of Basel in 1526. His mother was Christina Herbster, the sister of Johannes Oporinus (Herbster) the famed humanist printer. After Zwinger's father's death, Christina married the noted humanist Conrad Lycosthenes (Wolffhart).
Zwinger studied at the Universities of Basel, Lyon, and Paris before taking a doctorate in medicine at the University of Padua with Bassiano Landi, the successor of Johannes Baptista Montanus. In Paris he studied with the iconoclastic philosopher Petrus Ramus. He joined the faculty of the University of Basel as a member of the consilium facultatis medicae from 1559. At Basel he held successively chairs in Greek (1565), Ethics (1571), and finally theoretical medicine (1580).
“Theodor Zwinger” enters the record as swiss physician (1533-1588). Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Theodor, Zwinger and Swiss can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Aug 29, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q116094. VIAF identifies the subject as 3266789. The Library of Congress control number is n84805548. 3 of 3 selected statements include explicit references; 1 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1533, 1588, 1526 and 1559.
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This entry incorporates text from “Theodor Zwinger” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.