Beloved Son Felix: Coming of Age in the Renaissance

The exceptionally vivid, rare, and revealing journals of a 16th-century medical student.

In 1552, at the age of sixteen, Felix Platter left his home in Basel, Switzerland, and journeyed 370 miles to Montpelier, in the south of France. There he spent the next five years studying to become a physician. It was an extraordinary education—and not only in medicine. A Protestant in a Catholic kingdom, Felix witnessed blood-chilling executions and engaged in secret religious discussions with his lan...