Rudbeck’s explanation of the lymphatic system was indeed a major discovery in the annals of modern medicine—the first, in fact, to come from a Swedish scientist. It was also a fulfillment of William Harvey’s theories of the circulation of the blood, which were then still fiercely contested. In distant Uppsala, the young Rudbeck, not even twenty years old, had confirmed one of the greatest medical discoveries of the day.
WORD OF THIS remarkable student spread quickly through the Swedish kingdom, and soon reached its colorful queen. Like Greta Garbo, who played her in the film, Queen Christina has intrigued historians just as she fascinated her contemporaries. She was young, barely twenty-six years old, and somewhat shorter than medium height, with thick, curly, dark brown hair often tied with a simple black ribbon. Her voice was soft but deep, and her eyes piercing. Whenever she was displeased, it soon became abundantly clear, the queen’s face darkened like a “thunder cloud.” Eight years of power had accustomed her to doing exactly as she wished. Controversy, though, was never far away.
Rumors had long circulated that the Swedish queen was a nymphomaniac, a lesbian, a man in disguise, or perhaps a hermaphrodite. After all, when she was born, the midwife first took her for a boy, and even told the king that he had a new son. The hermaphrodite belief was dispelled only when a team of international experts, restoring her grave in the 1920s, decided to take a look. The queen, they confirmed, had indeed been a woman.
Despite all differences of opinion, her admirers and critics agreed on one point: Queen Christina attracted some of the best and brightest of the day. During her short reign, a motley collection of cavaliers, ladies, libertines, and scholars streamed to her court. Perhaps the most famous of these was Rene Descartes. There was probably no thinker of the day more idolized than this French philosopher.
Indeed, when he arrived in Stockholm, Descartes soon found himself taxed by Queen Christina’s enthusiasm for early-morning lessons in the new thought, and equally burdensome demands to compose ballets for entertainment in the evening. The Frenchman, overworked and exhausted, succumbed to an unusually cold winter in Christina’s unusually cold castle. He died in February 1650, after shivering through five miserable months at court (though his skull, it turned out, stayed in the country almost two hundred years longer; it had been secretly removed and replaced with a substitute, and was not reunited with his body in France until 1821).
It was now Olof Rudbeck’s turn to come to Queen Christina’s court. She was much impressed by his anatomical work and sent an invitation for the student to present his discoveries to her in person. On a beautiful spring day in 1652, Rudbeck arrived at the royal castle in Uppsala.
Set majestically on the highest hilltop, the castle overlooked the town barely a stone’s cast away from the cathedral. Construction of the castle, begun by King Gustav Vasa in the 1540s, was still unfinished. Only two sides of the desired square had been completed, and the surrounding hillside was overgrown with weeds. On the inside, though, the castle was decorated with treasures including paintings, tapestries, statues, and almost anything else of value that Swedish armies could pack up in chests and carry back to the north.
Like many distinguished guests before him, Rudbeck marched up to the castle, climbed the stone steps, and entered the great hall. As the court looked on, the twenty-one-year-old demonstrated his medical discovery. Queen Christina was dazzled. She never had to tap her fan in impatience, or play distractedly with her spaniels. She just sat transfixed on her crimson velvet cushion with eyes aglow at the spectacle. The courtiers saw a new rising star, and the queen did too. By the end of the day she had offered Rudbeck a royal scholarship to continue his studies at Leiden University. He left the castle, his ears ringing with praise and his head spinning with anticipation.
SWEDEN WAS, at this time, one of the most powerful countries in the world. Despite its small population, thinly scattered throughout the kingdom, Sweden had burst upon the scene in 1630, the year of Rudbeck’s birth, with some dazzling victories in the Thirty Years’ War. King Gustavus Adolphus’s army was praised as the best in the world, and his advanced, modernized bureaucracy was, as one observer put it, the envy of France. By the end of the war in 1648, and Rudbeck’s eighteenth birthday, Sweden had emerged with France as the guarantor of Europe’s peace.
Swedish territory then encircled the Baltic Sea and its sweet-smelling pine forests, its flat, marshy heaths, and its foggy pebble beaches. The blue and gold Swedish flag was raised in Finland, northern Germany, the modern Baltic states, and as far away as Cabo Corso on the African Gold Coast. There was even a “New Sweden” confidently planted in America on the Delaware River, including today’s Trenton and Philadelphia.
Rudbeck’s country had never been more powerful or more influential. Exports boomed, and its merchants, at first mostly Dutch immigrants, dominated some of the most lucrative trades of the day. Sweden was Europe’s unrivaled producer of copper and iron, and of the manufactured products that relied on these materials, such as cannon, cannonballs, and lightweight, quick-loading muskets. Lands in its Baltic dominion produced timber, hemp, flax, pitch, and tar, no small advantage in a warlike world just coming to appreciate the advantages of sea power. One Danish historian has compared the Baltic Sea in the seventeenth century to the Persian Gulf in the twentieth: though much of the region was undeveloped and remote, it was the source of scarce raw materials absolutely central to the functioning of the world at the time.
The capital of the kingdom, Stockholm, had grown rich controlling this trade, already boasting a stunning panorama of buildings, bridges, and water that would later earn it the name “Venice of the North.” The docks were bustling, too, with men unloading crates into the warehouses along the seafront. Horses drawing carriages clip- clopped down the cobblestone lanes, passing the fine buildings, the noble estates, and the brick churches with copper spires. Down in the center of the capital, tucked away in the Old Town, stood the Stockholm Banco, preparing, in just a few years, to issue the world’s first modern paper currency. All told, diligence and decadence went together in creating the period Swedish historians call the “Age of Greatness.”
But the small wooden huts clustering in the shadows of the towering mansions were reminders of another side to Sweden’s imperial age. For every laced-up, velvet-clad courtier enjoying Italian perfumes, there were many others who toiled under brutal conditions. As many as 90 percent of the population were peasants, squeezing out a tenuous existence on small homesteads, or bound under steep feudal obligations on large manors. Less fortunate still were the many victims of the recent wars. Armless veterans begged in the streets, and legions of orphans roamed in search of food. In desperation, many women became prostitutes, and some people joined the rogues hiding out in forests, preying upon the secluded roadways.
Olof Rudbeck had grown up in this environment of power and poverty. His home was Vasteras, then one of the largest towns in the country, and visibly prospering from the “great quantities of copper and iron, digged [
Vasteras also had Sweden’s first senior high school, founded by Rudbeck’s father, Johannes Rudbeckius, a former field chaplain who had risen to be one of King Gustavus Adolphus’s favorite bishops. He was a man of extraordinary energy and presence, with a high forehead, narrow-set eyes, and a long, thin face that ended in a long white beard. Courageous and stubborn, he was not known for tolerating any nonsense. In the words of one observer, he would rather go to the stake than stand down from his principles.
Clashes between the strict father and the somewhat carefree son were bound to occur. Once, as a young boy, Rudbeck received new dress clothes. They were quite a sight, with cuffs on the arms and shiny new buttons in the front. He had never had clothes like this before, as all his previous garments fastened on the sides with hooks, and the sleeves were slashed rather abruptly. Rudbeck was so pleased that he put them on and paraded around in the courtyard, feeling, as he said, as handsome as the pope in Rome. He played on his toy horse, pretending to be a gallant Spanish cavalryman. His father, however, happened to be looking out the window from his study. He marched outside, pulled out his knife, and cut off all the buttons and cuffs. The boy was immediately sent inside “to sit on his bottom.”
Since no vanity of any form was permitted in the household, Rudbeck was forced to wear his hair short and cropped around the ears in the seventeenth-century equivalent of a bowl cut. This not only was unfashionable but must have made his head seem unusually elongated. Some of the richer, aristocratic schoolboys took to teasing him with the nickname “Olle Bighead.” This was a lasting memory, and he sought solace in biblical reminders about the transitory nature of riches.
The importance of biblical lessons was stressed early and often in Rudbeck’s family. Not only by his father, who had mastered Greek, Latin, and Hebrew, some said, as well as his Swedish, but also by his mother, Malin Rudbeckius, born Magdalena Carlsdotter Hijsing. The daughter of a priest, she organized daily lessons for the family. She had read the Bible cover to cover at least seven times, and impressed many with her memory.
