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Biography
Ole Worm was born on 13 May 1588 in Aarhus, Denmark, into a prosperous family. Worm was the son of Willum Worm, who served as the mayor of Aarhus, and was made a rich man by an 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.
After attending the grammar school in Aarhus, Worm entered the University of Marburg in 1605, at about 17, where he began his studies in theology. He later pursued medicine, earning his doctorate at the University of Basel in 1611, in his early twenties. By 1617, he had returned to Copenhagen to take a Master of Arts degree at the University of Copenhagen, where he would spend the rest of his career.
Worm married Dorothea Fincke, the daughter of the mathematician and physicist Thomas Fincke, who invented the terms 'tangent' and 'secant' and taught at the University of Copenhagen for more than 60 years. Through this marriage, Worm became connected to the Bartholin family, a prominent dynasty of physicians and scholars who played a central role in the intellectual life of the University of Copenhagen in the 17th and 18th centuries.
He was a professor at the University of 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 bubonic plague, which led to his own death from the plague in 1654.
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Scientific and cultural significance
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.
Worm is known to have been a collector of early literature in the Scandinavian languages. He also wrote a number of treatises on runestones and collected texts that were written in runic. Worm received letters of introduction to the bishops of Denmark and Norway from the King of Denmark-Norway due to the king's interest and approval.
In 1626 Worm published his "Danish Chronology" (Fasti Danici) containing the results of his researches into runic lore; and in 1636 his "Runes: the oldest Danish literature" (Runir seu Danica literatura antiquissima), a compilation of transcribed runic texts. In 1643 his "Danish Monuments" (Danicorum Monumentorum) was published. The first written study of runestones, it is also one of the only surviving sources for depictions of numerous runestones and inscriptions from Denmark, some of which are now lost. An illustration of his pet bird, a great auk, survives as the only known illustration of a live member of the species, which is now extinct.
As a scientist, Worm straddled the line between modern and pre-modern. As an example, in a very modern, empirical mode, Worm determined in 1638 that the unicorn did not exist and that purported unicorn horns simply were from the narwhal. At the same time, however, he then wondered if the anti-poison properties associated with a unicorn's horn still held true, and undertook experiments in poisoning pets and then serving them ground up narwhal horn (his poisoning must have been relatively mild because he reported that they did recover).
Other empirical investigations he conducted included providing convincing evidence that lemmings were rodents and not, as some thought, spontaneously generated by the air, and also by providing the first detailed drawing of a bird-of-paradise proving that they did, despite much popular speculation to the opposite, indeed have feet like regular birds. Worm's primary use of his natural history collection was for the purpose of pedagogy.
Museum Wormianum
As a natural philosopher, Worm assembled a great collection of curiosities, which ranged from native artifacts collected from the New World, to taxidermed animals, to fossils, on which he speculated greatly. Museum Wormianum was the cabinet of rarities of the natural history cabinet established by Ole Worm in Copenhagen. It consists of minerals, plants, animals, and man-made objects.
Worm compiled engravings of his collection, along with his speculations about their meaning, into a catalog of his Museum Wormianum, published after his death in 1654. Museum Wormianum contained a detailed description of the natural history cabinet. The text is divided into four books; the first three dealing with minerals, plant and animal. The fourth detailed archaeological and ethnographic items.
In popular culture
The early twentieth century horror author H. P. Lovecraft mentions Olaus Wormius as having translated the fictional Al Azif (commonly known as the Necronomicon) from Greek to Latin; however, he dates this translation 1228, four centuries before the historical Wormius's lifetime. Horror writer Anders Fager has elaborated this myth in several of his tales. Ole Worm appears in one of the Icelandic Sjón's novels From the Mouth of the Whale.