Kōnig, Emanuel

(b. Basel, Switzeland, 1 November 1658; d. Basel, 30 July 1731)

natural history, medicine.

The son of a bookseller, König was educated in his native city. He pursued a comprehensive program of studies at the University of Basel, receiving his M.D. degree on 31 October 1682. In that year, though the efforts of his friend George Wolfgang Wedel, professor of medicine at Jena, König joined the German Academia Naturae Curiosorum (after 1687 the Academia Casearea Leopoldina) and subsequently contributed a numbe rof papers of its Miscellancea. After traveling for several years in Italy and France, he returned to Basel in 1695 to become professor of Greek. He remained in that city until his death, becoming professor of physics in 1703 and professor of medicine in 1711. It is as popularizer rather than innovator that König is important in the history of science. His writings are marked by clarity and draw upon a broad range of contemporary as well as classical scientific and medical literature, including the proceedings of major scientific societies.

König’s most important published works are three excellent texts: Regnum animale (1682), Regnum minerals (1686), and Regnum vegetabile (1688). In the first treatise, which was praised in the Acta eruditorum as the best of its kind that had yet appeared, he presents a detailed analysis of animals internal structure and physiology. König emphasizes the causal role of animal spirits in physiological activity, frequently citing John Mayow’s theory and experiments concerning nitroaerial particles (or spirits) to explain respiration, muscle action, and disease. Adopting Descarte’s concept of animals as automatons, he divides them into five classes—quadrupeds, flying animals, swimming animals, serpents, and insects— with the proviso that this classification be understood as approximate rather than precise. Although critical of astrology and the “cures” which ionfested the medical literature of the seventeenth century, König was nonetheless intrigued with the use of animal parts and products as medicines; and he occasionally credited somewhat extravagant claims for the efficacy of skulls, elephant’s tusks, and the like.

König’s writings on the vegetable and mineral realms parallel his treatment of animals: they are well-reasoned books which critically utilize the results of considerable reading and research. The Regnum minerale contains much chemical information and employs rational and convenient symbols for which König supplies a clear explanatory plate. HIs analysis of metals, gems, salts, sulfurs and earths is accurate, although he show so coredulityi with respect to the magic virtue of gems and relies upon the common, albeit erroneous, analogy made between the generation, nutrition, and augmentation of metals and that of animals. His work on plants is reliable and repudiates Van Helmont and Boyle’s opinion that plants are nourished by water alone, by demonstrating that saline and nitrous ingredients play a role in vegetative growth. König was attracted to the new corpuscular philosophy and asserted that the reputed occult virtues of plants could be explained mechanically; his treatment of the doctrine of signatures is an example of the attempt to apply corpuscular theory.

An astute observer of contemporary developments, König was able to modify tradition ideas. His writings, while not completely uncontaminated by superstition, were successful in disseminating major ideas in natural history and medicine during the last decades of the seventeenth and the early years of the eighteenth centuries.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

1. Original Works. A complete list of König’s writings is in Heinrich Rotermund, Fortsetzung und Ergänzungen zu Christiaiin G. Jöchers Allgemeinem Gelehrten-Llexlicon (Delmenhorst, 1810; repr. Hildesheim, 1961), III 641-643. König’s major scientific writings are Regnum animale . . . physice, medice, anatomice, mechanice, theooretice, practice . . . enumeratum, et emedullatum, hominis scilicet et brutoruom, machinam hydraulico-pneumaticam comparate (Basel, 1682; 3rd ed., 1703); Regnum minerale . . . metallorum, lapidum, salium, sulphurum, terrarum . . . praparationes selectissimas ususque multiplices candide sistens (Basel, 1686). Regnum minerale generale et speciale, quorum illud naturalem et artificialem mineralium productionem cum parallelismo alchymico verorum philosophorum (Basel, 1703); and several differnet works with the general title Regnum vegetabile the most important being Regnum vegetabile . . . vegetabile nimirum naturam, ortoum, propagandi modum,. . . colorem, figuram, signaturam (Basel, 1688).

II. Secondary Literature. Details concerninig König’s life can be found ion Christian G. Jöcher, Allgemeinem Gelehrten-Lexicon (Leipzig, 1750; repr. Hildesheim, 1961), II, 2136; and F. Hoefer, ed., Nouovelle biographie générale, XXVIII (1859), 7. Recent assessments of König’s scientific work are J. R. Partington, A History of Chemistry, II (London, 1961), 318, 616, 713-714; and Lynn Thorndike, A History of Magic and Experimental Science (New York, 1958), VII, 266-267, 690, 693; VIII, 43-47, 79, 426.

Martin Fichman