[Pieter van Foreest: physician on the threshold of a new era].

In a variety of ways attention is being drawn nowadays to the fact that Pieter van Foreest (1521-1597) died four hundred years ago. The question arises, however, whether such a comprehensive commemoration is justified by Van Foreest's contribution to the development of medical science. Medical history certainly does not attribute concrete substantial new findings to his name. Nevertheless, he earned the longstanding epithet 'Dutch Hippocrates' by his writings. Especially, his Observationes et curationes medicinales c.q. chirurgicales remained on vogue for some centuries after his death, mainly due to the accurate description of symptomatology of a wide variety of diseases. Van Foreest should be considered as a conspicuous representative of the new empirical medicine which gained favour after the humanistic rediscovery of the classical Greek authors, especially Hippocrates.