Agricola trained in medicine in Italy and then took a post as town physician in Joachimsthal, a silver-mining boom town in the Erzgebirge, where he spent his time underground with the miners rather than only at the bedside. De Re Metallica, finished before his death in 1555 and published the following year, is the result: twelve books covering the search for ore, the law and organisation of mines, surveying, shaft construction, pumping and ventilation machinery, the crushing and washing of ore, smelting, the assay, the separation of silver from gold, and the making of salt, glass and other products of the furnace. It carries several hundred woodcuts commissioned to show the machinery in operation, and the illustrations are as much of the achievement as the text, since a hoist or a pump is far more easily conveyed by a picture.
The book remained the working reference for European mining for something like two hundred years. It was translated into English in 1912 by the mining engineer Herbert Hoover, later president of the United States, and his wife Lou Henry Hoover, a classicist, whose annotated edition is still the one most readers use. He wrote several other works on the same material, including a study of the origin of ore deposits and one of the earliest systematic treatments of minerals arranged by their physical properties.