Page "Uppsala University" Paragraph 12

Queen Christina was generous to the university, gave scholarships to Swedish students to study abroad and recruited foreign scholars to Uppsala chairs, among them several from the University of Strassburg, notably the philologist Johannes Schefferus ( professor skytteanus ), whose little library and museum building at S: t Eriks torg now belongs to the Royal Society of Sciences in Uppsala.

The Queen, who would eventually declare her abdication in the great hall of Uppsala Castle, visited the university on many occasions ; in 1652 she was present at an anatomical demonstration arranged at the castle for the young physician Olaus Rudbeck.

Rudbeck, one of several sons of Johannes Rudbeckius, a former Uppsala professor who became Bishop of Västerås, was sent for a year to the progressive University of Leiden in the Netherlands.

Returning in 1654, he received an assistantship in Medicine in 1655, and had already gone to work on a program of improving aspects of the university.

He planted the first botanical garden, the one which would eventually be tended by Carl Linnaeus and is kept today as a museum of 18th century botany under the name Linnaeus ' Garden.

With the patronage of the university chancellor Magnus Gabriel De la Gardie, Rudbeck was made full professor in 1660, was elected rector for two terms, despite his youth, and started a revision of the work of the other professors and a building spree with himself as architect.

His most significant remaining architectural work is the anatomical theatre, which was added to Gustavianum in the 1660s and crowned with the characteristic cupola for which the building is today known.