Daily Devotion

The German Jesuit Johann Schreck (Terrentius, 1576–1630), a physician, naturalist and mathematician, was elected to the Accademia dei Lincei in Rome in 1611, shortly after Galileo, and entered the Society of Jesus the same year. He reached Macau in 1619 and later, while staying in the home of Li Zhizao in Hangzhou, prepared the two-volume Taixi renshen shuogai (An Outline of the Western Theory of the Human Body), describing the skeletal, muscular, circulatory, nervous and sensory systems: the first book in China to introduce Western physiology and anatomy. It was edited and prefaced by Bi Gongchen and printed only in 1634. In his last years he worked on the reform of the calendar, and he died in Beijing in 1630.