Opera aliquot et versiones (Selected works and translations), by John Caius. Printed in Leuven by Antoine-Marie Bergagne, 1556. Lower Library, K.18.24

Probably best known in Cambridge today for his position as the re-founder of Gonville and Caius College, John Caius (1510–1573) was a scholar and physician. After his time at Gonville Hall as a theology student, he moved to Padua, where he studied medicine. It was probably whilst in Padua that Caius began his lifelong interest in Galen.

This book contains one of the many texts Caius wrote about Galen. He was convinced by the belief that Galen was infallible, and that medicine would be safer and more effective if physicians followed Galen’s methods of diagnosis and healing and abandoned medieval practices.¹

Following Galen’s views, he saw anatomy as fundamental to medicine, and in his college statutes he instructed that an annual dissection should be carried out in Cambridge. It is speculated that this procedure might have later influenced William Harvey during his time at Gonville and Caius.

As well as his work on medicine and Galen, Caius also extended his research into the animal kingdom. When Konrad Gesner was putting together the first zoological survey he wrote to Caius for details about the names and breeds of English dogs. Caius replied with sketches and descriptions but continued his research and produced a more refined version, which is also bound in this volume. King James I himself requested a copy of De canibus Britannicis instead of the copy of De antiquitate Cantabrigiensis academiae which Caius had offered him.²

In the gallery you can see a dog breed classification chart from the text, with names in Latin and English. Caius was so dedicated to his research into the natural world that he kept a puffin in his house for eight months, noting its behaviour and feeding patterns. The work he published from this is the first detailed description of the Atlantic puffin.³

Above the portrait of Caius, shown in the gallery, you can see where he has inscribed ‘Fui Caius’ (I was Caius).

The armoured man << Fui Caius >> The Hippocratic corpus

1. Vivian Nutton, ‘Caius, John (1510–1573), Scholar and Physician’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. 23 Sep. 2004; Accessed 3 May 2023.
2. John Venn, Caius College (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1923), 71.
3. Mike P. Harris and Sarah Wanless, The Puffin (London: Poyser, 2011), 15.