CHAPTER FOUR
Undergraduate at Upsala
NO matter how antiscientific he might be, Bishop Swedberg was interested in one science, that of medicine. Not that he had ever been ailing, according to himself his health was as perfect as his character, but he noted several useful cures. One was for jaundice; it was "swine-dirt, with respects to you, mixed into a beer posset or any thin soup." In general, however, he recommended the sovereign remedy of "good old honest Rhenish wine, but it must be old and it must be honest."
Johannes Moraeus, 1 a bright nephew of his, was sent by the Bishop to study pharmaceutics in Stockholm. Moraeus, so contemporaries said of him, was "a man of equable temper, not much affected by life's ups and downs"; more important still, he was of the science party, enthusiastic about mineralogy as well as medicine. Through him the Bishop was, unwittingly, to open a door very early to the new world of facts for his little son. The youth was about to become the first apothecary of Stockholm when his uncle requested his presence in Upsala for the Swedberg children, holding out the inducement that he would also be able to study medicine at the university. It was the sort of charity plus economy that the Bishop loved, and it was a good thing for the eight-year-old Emanuel, whose mother had just died, that this cousin joined the household in 1696. 2
Emanuel was fond of his tutor; he had a pet name for him, "Morfee." Many years later when the mature Swedenborg began making his strange journeys to that other world which he considered equally factual, he made brief and often scathing observations on what he now saw people to be like who had put up a fine front in this life. But Moraeus fared well. He must have been rather an ugly man, for Swedenborg said he did not at first recognize him, explaining that according to the laws of that other sphere the beauty of his tutor's inner goodness and truthfulness had now become exterior also. 3
