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Conrad Gesner (also Konrad Gessner) was a Swiss Renaissance man in several senses. His gifts were in compiling and organizing the burgeoning knowledge available to the Renaissance, be it linguistic, literary, botanical, or zoological beyond the traditional Latin and Greek canon to the texts of Hebrew and North African and Near Eastern writers.  Gessner came from a large and very poor family and was sent off for education to his great uncle, Johannes Frick, a chaplain with an interest in collecting samples of the natural world, enhancing Gessner’s interest in the natural world but with the financial support his teachers, he read classics at Fraumünster and studied theology in France. His mentor was the bellicose Protestant theologian Ulrich Zwingli (1484-1531). When both Zwingli and Gessner’s father died in the Second War of Kappel, he switched to medicine and studied in Bourges, then Paris, sponsored by acquaintances who recognized his talent. He studied theology in Strasbourg but removed to Basle to study medicine. A fervent if pacifist Protestant, his books would be prohibited by the Inquisition. He was supported in his studies in Basel by the theologian and reformer Heinrich Bullinger (1504-75) and there at the age of 21, he completed his Greek-Latin dictionary based on the Magnum et puertile dictionarium (1523) of Varinus Phavorinus of Favera (d. 1537). 

Once settled at the Carolinum College in Zurich, Gesner began his prolific publications, spurred by the need to care for his family. At the age of 29 he was commissioned to compile a compendium of the lives and works of all Greek, Roman, and Hebrew authors. His Bibliotheca universalis (1545), a foundational work of bibliography, followed by a volume of Pandects (1548), digests of ancient knowledge in arts and sciences, and in 1549, an Appendix Bibliothecae(1555). The entire work comprised over 3000 entries written by Gessner himself and was the first bibliography printed after the invention of the printing press.

 All of Gessner’s reading in ancient literature and his study of medicine fed his consuming interest in the natural world. His great but unfinished zoological compendium, Historia animalium, compiled sources from Greek, Roman, Arabic, and Medieval sources, along with, of course, Gessner’s own lifetime of observation. It contained approximately 4500 pages divided by genus. He also produced a Historium plantarum et vires and Catalogus plantarum.

His contributions to classical study include O Mithridates…, “the first attempt towards the comparative study of language” (Sandys 2:269), and again extended current knowledge beyond the authorities of Greece and Rome, treating 130 known languages in all, with the hope that others will “treat the subject more thoroughly and in greater depth,” He produced an edition of Stobaeus, the editio princeps of Aelian’s De Natura Animalium (1556), and Marcus Aurelius (1559). O Mithridates De differentiis linguarum (1555) represented another expansion of knowledge beyond the Greek and Roman words.  

The Historia animalium was intended to be followed by a comprehensive botany. However, G.'s early death prevented its completion. Early death, having treated patients for plague, left it uncompleted. Published 1753 Nuremberg: C.C. Schmiedel)