GRAAF, REoxiER DE, a celebrated Dutch physician, was b. at Schoonhove in 1641, and d. at Delft in 1678. He studied at the university of Leyden under Dubois (De le Bee), who is better known under his Latinized name of Sylvius; and on the death of the latter, in 1672, would have been unanimously elected to the vacant chair, if his religion (he was a Catholic) had not proved an insuperable obstacle to his appointment. In 1664, when only twenty-three years of age, he published his Disputatio Medial de Natura et Use Stied Panereatiei, which, although containing several errors—as for instance, that the pancreatic juice is acid, and that many diseases, and especially intermittent fevers, are due to a morbid condition of this fiuid—gained him a great reputation. After a short residence in France, where he took his doctor's degree at Angers in 1665, he returned to Holland, and settled at Delft, where his success in practice gained him much envy. He rendered great service to anatomy in being the inventor of those injections
of the blood-vessels which Swammerdam. and Ruysch brought to a state of comparative excellence, and which are at the present day the basis of our sound knowledge of most of the tissues of the body. He published several dissertations on the organs of genera tion in both sexes, which involved him in a prolonged and angry controversy with Swammerdam. According to Haller, his death was occasioned by an attack of jaundice, brought on by the excitement of this controversy, but we do not know Haller's authority for this assertion. All his works were published in one octave volume,. entitled Opera Omnia, in 1677, and republished in 1678 and 1705.