Paracelsus was a Swiss physician, chemist, botanist, alchemist, and astrologer who is famous for his iconoclastic rebellion against the conservative medical orthodoxy of his day, as well as for his bold, new ideas in medicine, psychology, and the healing arts. He published Der grossen Wundartzney (Great Surgery Book) in 1536 and a clinical description of syphilis in 1530.
Background
Paracelsus, byname of Philippus Aureolus Theophrastus Bombastus von Hohenheim, was born on November 11 or December 17, 1493, in Einsiedeln, Switzerland.
His father was an impoverished Swabian doctor and chemist named Wilhelm Bombast von Hohenheim who served as a physician at the Benedictine abbey in Einsiedeln. His mother was a Swiss woman named Elsa Oschner, a bondswoman in the abbey of Einsiedeln who before her marriage worked as a superintendent in the abbey's hospital.
After his mother's death, he and his father moved to Villach, Carinthia, which was located in Southern Austria in 1502, where his father worked as a physician, tending to the medical needs of the pilgrims there.
Education
Theophrastus's father instructed him in Latin, botany, chemistry, and the history of religion. Theophrastus attended the Bergschule, founded by the wealthy Fugger family of merchant bankers of Augsburg, where his father taught chemical theory and practice. There he learned about metals, ores, and chemicals used to process them.
Theophrastus studied in Basel, Switzerland, and Italy, where he learned classical medical theory. He also studied at the University of Vienna, earning a baccalaureate in medicine in 1510, and then returned to Italy, where he received his doctorate in medicine from the University of Ferrara in 1515.
While he was in Ferrara he took the name Paracelsus, which means "beyond Celsus." Celsus was a doctor of ancient Rome who was admired by Paracelsus's fellow physicians.
Career
After obtaining his doctoral degree Paracelsus set out on a journey throughout Europe, which covered Denmark, Sweden, Holland, Germany, France, Spain, Hungary, Poland, England, Scotland, Ireland, Prussia, and Tartary.
He was taken captive by the Tartars when he went to Russia later. He escaped from them and fled to Lithuania and then to Hungary in the south. In 1521 he joined the Venetian army as an army surgeon and traveled through Arabia, Egypt, the Holy Land, and finally came to Constantinople.
Wherever he went, he met and talked with the experts and knowledgeable people who could teach him more about practical alchemy and learned the most effective ways to treat patients as well as using the latent forces in nature to cure them.
In 1524 Paracelsus returned to his home in Villach to find that his fame for many miraculous cures had preceded him. He was subsequently appointed town physician and lecturer in medicine at the University of Basel in Switzerland. Students from all over Europe attended his classes on medicine. He reached the peak of his career while at Basel where he denounced the use of ineffective pills, potions, salves, balms, and other things that prevented nature from healing wounds.
In 1526 he became a citizen of Strasbourg and tried to establish his own practice. During this time he was called to treat Johann Froben, a successful printer, and publisher, who was on his sickbed. Paracelsus was able to cure Johann.
Erasmus von Rotterdam, the Dutch humanist during the Renaissance period, had witnessed Paracelsus's medical skills and offered to initiate a joint dialogue on theological and medical matters. By 1528, Paracelsus had made enemies of the doctors, magistrates, and apothecaries in Basel and had to leave for Colmar located about fifty miles north of Basel in Upper Alsace.
Paracelsus wrote a clinical description of syphilis in 1530 where he stated that the disease could be treated by the intake of compounds of mercury in measured quantities.
In 1536 Paracelsus published a book on surgery titled "Der grossen Wundartzney" which was the first of its kind in that period.
He traveled through the country during the next eight years, stayed with friends, made revisions to his old writings, and wrote new ones including the book on surgery which made him famous for the second time. He visited Nuremberg, Beritzhausen, and Amberg in 1529, St. Gall and Innsbruck in 1531, Sterzing and Meran in 1534, Augsburg in 1535, and Presburg and Vienna in 1537.
Paracelsus returned to Villach in May 1538 to meet his father but found that he had passed away four years back. He was exiled from Basel in the same year.
In 1541 Paracelsus himself died in mysterious circumstances at the White Horse Inn, Salzburg, where he had taken up an appointment under the prince-archbishop, Duke Ernst of Bavaria.
Religion
Paracelsus seemingly remained a Catholic to his death. However, it is suspected that his books were placed on the Index Expurgatorius - a catalogue of books from which passages of text considered immoral or against the Catholic religion are removed. Similar to Luther, Paracelsus also lectured and wrote in German rather than in Latin.
Paracelsus was concerned with many of the basic issues that still confront mankind today: who are we, what is our relationship with nature and with God, is there an after-life, what about the soul. This was part of his approach to psychiatry. He believed that there were two forces acting in all humans and these forces, animal and godly, were antagonistic. Interestingly, he denounced the view that psychoses were demonic in origin. He also espoused the notion that mind/will/spirit/soul can influence the state of the body and can cause or cure a disorder.
Views
Paracelsus was an original medical thinker, and a medical populist of his day; some would even call him a medical revolutionary. Instead of the customary and academic Latin, Paracelsus taught his students in the colloquial German. He wanted to shake medical orthodoxy out of its deep slumber and hypnotic, blind obeisance to the scholastic dictates of the classical medical authorities.
Paracelsus was always working to try to upgrade the status of surgeons. He also emphasized cleanliness and antiseptics in surgery, telling his students that if the surgeon only takes care to keep a wound from getting infected, Nature will take care of the rest, and heal the wound.
In his rebellion against the staid traditionalism of the medical educational system of his day, Paracelsus shook up the field, and was a progressive voice calling for change and the influx of new ideas. He rejected the scholastic philosophy that permeated education in medicine and the sciences of his day, which revered and enshrined the books and teachings of Aristotle, Galen, Avicenna and Averroes, and their Catholic interpreter, Saint Thomas Aquinas. Paracelsus is said to have used special Mercury preparations to treat syphilis. Paracelsus wrote a major medical treatise entitled, On The Miner’s Sickness and Other Diseases of Miners, which focused on various treatment and prevention strategies for combatting silicosis and other occupational diseases of miners and metal workers.
Paracelsus is commonly held to be the father of toxicology. In his opinion, substances that were virulent poisons in certain doses could be valuable therapeutic agents at other doses, a mode of thought that obviously inspired Homeopathy. He is also credited with the naming and discovery of Zinc, calling it "Zinke," or pointed, from the shape of its crystals. He is said to have developed the medicine Laudanum, an alcoholic tincture of Opium, which was in common use until the nineteenth century. Paracelsus was also one of the first to use opiates as anesthetics in surgery.
Paracelsus was a practicing astrologer, as were many physicians of his day, and designed and made astrological amulets and talismans for warding off various diseases, and for the various signs of the zodiac. Astrology was part and parcel of Paracelsus' Hermetic worldview, which also incorporated the arts of alchemy and magic. The core of Hermetic philosophy is embodied in the maxim: "As above, so below; as within, so without." And so, Paracelsus believed in planetary and alchemical correspondences for every organ and function of the human body and maintained that a state of health and wellbeing was the result of a harmony between the microcosm of the human body and the macrocosm of Nature and the universe.
In this worldview, each of the seven planets of classical astrology had a correspondence with a certain internal organ and a certain metal, for example. The Sun ruled the Heart, and its metal was Gold. The Moon ruled the Brain, and its metal was Silver. Mercury ruled the Lungs, and its metal was Quicksilver, or Mercury. Venus ruled the Kidneys, and its metal was Copper. Mars ruled the Gall Bladder, and its metal was Iron. Jupiter ruled the Liver, and its metal was Tin. Saturn ruled the Spleen, and its metal was Lead. And of course, the seven planets also have their correspondences with the days of the week as well.
Paracelsus tried to bring chemistry and the scientific method into medicine; he used chemistry and chemical analogies in his teachings to medical students and to the medical establishment, who found them objectionable.
He believed that body organs functioned alchemically, that is, they separated pure from impure.
He discounted the humoral theory of Galen, whose newly rediscovered works became the foundation for medicine. Galen postulated that there were four humors in the body (blood, phlegm, and yellow and black bile); when these were in balance, one enjoyed health, and when there was an imbalance, sickness ensued. Paracelsus, the alchemist, believed in three humors: salt (representing stability), sulfur (representing combustibility), and mercury (representing liquidity); he defined disease as a separation of one humor from the other two. Although he largely rejected Aristotle and Galen's theories of the elements and humors, Paracelsus, as a magician and metaphysician, still utilized the Four Elements for their various other subtle qualities, properties, and attributes.
Galenists believed that a disease of certain intensity would be cured by a medicine of opposite intensity (principle of contrariety). Paracelsus and his followers espoused the position that like cures like; that is, "a poison in the body would be cured by a similar poison, (principle of similitude) but the dosage is very important." Although he wrote that "nature hints at cures," he felt that many herbal preparations lacked sufficient potency to treat current diseases.
Paracelsus introduced (actually reintroduced) into medicine the use of inorganic salts, metals, and minerals (although some had been used by the ancients). Plants were out and chemicals were in. Paracelsus ushered in the era of "New Chemical Medicine."
Quotations:
"Medicine rests upon four pillars - philosophy, astronomy, alchemy, and ethics. The first pillar is the philosophical knowledge of earth and water; the second, astronomy, supplies its full understanding of that which is of fiery and airy nature; the third is an adequate explanation of the properties of all the four elements - that is to say, of the whole cosmos - and an introduction into the art of their transformations; and finally, the fourth shows the physician those virtues which must stay with him up until his death, and it should support and complete the three other pillars."
"The physician must pass through the examination of nature, which is the world, and all its causation. And what nature teaches him he must commend to his wisdom, not seeking anything in his wisdom, but only in the light of nature."
"All things are poisons, for there is nothing without poisonous qualities. It is only the dose which makes a thing poison."
"Man is a microcosm, or a little world, because he is an extract from all the stars and planets of the whole firmament, from the earth and the elements; and so he is their quintessence."
Personality
Paracelsus was known for kindling controversies. On June 24, 1527, Paracelsus burned the books written by the Arab physician Avicenna and the Greek physician Galen in front of the university which reminded the people of Dr. Martin Luther who burnt a papal bull threatening excommunication in front of the Elster Gate in Wittenberg, Germany on December 10, 1520.
Paracelsus was an arrogant and difficult man who liked to ridicule other physicians. Because of his attitude, he soon earned the dislike and anger of many other physicians in Europe.
He was sometimes referred to as the "Devil's physician" for curing many patients with his strange remedies as if by magic.
