Gerard van Swieten (7 May 1700 – 18 June 1772) was a Dutch physician who from 1745 was the personal physician of the Holy Roman Empress Maria Theresa and transformed the Austrian health service and medical university education. He was the father of Gottfried van Swieten, patron of Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven. Youth and study Gerard van Swieten was the one surviving child of a prominent Catholic family in Leiden. His parents, the notary Thomas van Swieten (1662–1712) and Elisabeth Loo (†1708), had their children baptized by Jesuit priests, and Van Swieten remained a Roman Catholic throughout his life. His paternal family had been prominent Leiden citizens since the 15th century, carrying a coat of arms with three violins, which Van Swieten modified and adopted when he was made a Baron in 1753. They potentially descended from the old but already extinct noble house of , from the castle Zwieten, though there is no direct evidence for this. Van Swieten was a precocious student, finishing Latin school at the age of 12, around the time he became an orphan on 8 July 1712. His father had appointed two friends as guardians, Adriaan Duyvens and Arnold Coops, and, when in Leiden, Van Swieten would live at Coops' house until 1727. He had already enrolled at Leiden University to study philosophy, though at the age of 14, he studied a few months in Leuven (September 1714 – January 1715) and from 1715 he set his mind on pharmacy. Between November 1715 and December 1716 he was a resident pupil of the pharmacist Laurens Tatum in Amsterdam, breaking of this education when he contracted smallpox. Back in Leiden he enrolled at the University again and became a resident pupil with the pharmacist Nicolaas Stam, whose father had introduced Herman Boerhaave to chemistry. After three years, in 1720, he became a pharmacist; the following 5 year he not only ran a pharmacy, but also studied medicine at Leiden University. Here he almost exclusively followed classes by Herman Boerhaave and Bernhard Siegfried Albinus. With Albinus as his advisor, he obtained his medical doctorate in July 1725 with a dissertation on the structure and function of arteries (De arteriae fabrica et efficacia in corpore humano). A physician in Leiden Following his promotion, Van Swieten started a medical practice in Leiden. He initially ran his pharmacy in parallel, but in 1727 he handed this over to a