page_title: Georgius Agricola
section_title: Town physician and pharmacist
hierarchical_section_title: Georgius Agricola / Professional life / Town physician and pharmacist
caption_attribution_description: English: Woodcut scanned from original work by Agricola
context_page_description: Georgius Agricola was a German Humanist scholar, mineralogist and metallurgist. Born in the small town of Glauchau, in the Electorate of Saxony of the Holy Roman Empire, he was broadly educated, but took a particular interest in the mining and refining of metals. He is well known for his pioneering work De re metallica libri XII, that was published in 1556, one year after his death. This 12-volume work is a comprehensive and systematic study, classification and methodical guide on all available factual and practical aspects, that are of concern for mining, the mining sciences and metallurgy, investigated and researched in its natural environment by means of direct observation. Unrivalled in its complexity and accuracy, it served as the standard reference work for two centuries. Agricola stated in the preface, that he will exclude all those things which I have not myself seen, or have not read or heard of.[...].That which I have neither seen, nor carefully considered after reading or hearing of, I have not written about.
context_section_description: He returned to Zwickau in 1527 and to Chemnitz in autumn of the same year, where he married Anna Meyner, a widow from Schneeberg. Upon his search for employment as town physician and pharmacist in the Ore Mountains, preferably a place, where he can satisfy his ardent longings for the studies on mining, he settled in the suitable little town Joachimsthal in the Bohemian Erzgebirge, where in 1516 significant silver ore deposits were found. The 15,000 inhabitants made Joachimsthal a busy, booming centre of mining and smelting works with hundreds of shafts for Agricola to investigate. His primary post proved to be not very demanding and he lent all his spare time to his studies. Beginning in 1528 he immersed himself in comparisons and tests on what had been written about mineralogy and mining and his own observations of the local materials and the methods of their treatment. He constructed a logical system of the local conditions, rocks and sediments, the minerals and ores, explained the various terms of general and specific local territorial features. He combined this discourse on all natural aspects with a treatise on the actual mining, the methods and processes, local extraction variants, the differences and oddiities he had learnt from the miners. For the first time, he tackled questions on the formation of ores and minerals, attempted to bring the underlying mechanisms to light and introduce his conclusions in a systematic framework. He laid out the whole process in a scholarly dialogue and published it under the title Bermannus, sive de re metallica dialogus, (Bermannus, or a dialogue on metallurgy) in 1530. The work was highly praised by Erasmus for the attempt to put the knowledge, won by practical inquiry into order and further investigate in reduced form. Agricola, in his capacity of physician, also suggested, that minerals and their effects on and relationship to human medicine should be a future subject of investigation.
caption: A water mill used for raising ore
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