Ole Worm

Ole Worm
Ole Worm by Carl van Mandern
Born	13 May 1588 Aarhus
Died	31 August 1654 Copenhagen

Ole Worm (13 May 1588 – 31 August 1654), who often went by the Latinized form of his name Olaus Wormius, was a Danish physician and antiquary.

Worm was the son of Willum Worm who served as the mayor of Aarhus, and was made a rich man by the inheritance from his father. Ole Worm's grandfather Johan Worm, a magistrate in Aarhus, was a Lutheran who had fled from Arnhem in Gelderland while it was under Catholic rule.

Worm married Dorothea Fincke, the daughter of a friend and colleague, Thomas Fincke, a mathematician who invented the terms 'tangent' and 'secant'.

Ole Worm was something of a perpetual student: after attending the grammar school of Aarhus, he continued his education at the University of Marburg studying theology in 1605. He received his Doctor of Medicine degree from the University of Basel in 1611, and received a Master of Arts degree from the University of Copenhagen in 1617. The rest of his academic career was spent in Copenhagen, where he taught Latin, Greek, physics, and medicine. He was personal physician to King Christian IV of Denmark. Somewhat remarkable for a physician of the time, he remained in the city of Copenhagen to minister to the sick during an epidemic of the Black Death.

In medicine, Worm's chief contributions were in embryology. The Wormian bones (small bones that fill gaps in the cranial sutures) are named after him.