Died 1590, Heidelberg, Germany | ||
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Jacobus Theodorus (Jakob Dietrich), called Tabernaemontanus (1525 – August 1590) was a physician and an early botanist and herbalist, the "father of "German botany" whose illustrated Neuwe Kreuterbuch (1588) or Eicones Plantarum (Frankfurt, 1590) was the result of a lifetime's botanizing and medical practice. It provided unacknowledged material for John Gerard's better-known Herball (London, 1597) and was reprinted in Germany throughout the 17th century. His Latinized name represented a translation of his native town, Bergzabern (literally ‘mountain taverne’) in the Palatinate. Tabernaemontanus began as a student of the pioneer of Renaissance botany, Hieronymus Bock.
The career of Tabernaemontanus was supported in the usual manner of his time: by a series of places as court physician to German nobles. In 1549 he was the private doctor to Philip III, Count of Nassau-Weilburg and later to Marquard von Hattstein, bishop of Speyer. Later he served as town physician to the free imperial city of Worms, Germany.
He studied with Bock in Heidelberg, where he spent the last decades of his life, in Bock's footsteps, as physician to his liege lord, the Prince-Elector and where he died, having been three times married and the father of eighteen children. He is commemorated in the pan-tropical genus of flowering shrubs and small trees Tabernaemontana; the French botanist Charles Plumier erected the genus, as a compliment to Tabernaemontanus, and it was adopted by Linnaeus.