The genus is named after the seventeenth century Danish scientist Thomas Bartholin.
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Instead, Danish anatomist Caspar Bartholin credits Franciscus Sylvius with the discovery, and Bartholin's son Thomas named it the Sylvian fissure in the 1641 edition of the textbook Institutiones anatomicae.
The lymphatic system was first described in the seventeenth century independently by Olaus Rudbeck and Thomas Bartholin.