Paracelsus

Swiss scientist, physician, and scholar

• Born: November 11 or December 17, 1493
• Birthplace: Einsiedeln, Swiss Confederation (now in Switzerland)
• Died: September 24, 1541
• Place of death: Salzburg, Archbishopric of Salzburg (now in Austria)

Paracelsus has been hailed as the founder of biochemistry. He also made major contributions to the development of modern chemistry and made revolutionary changes in Renaissance medical theory and practice.

Early Life

Philippus Aureolus Theophrastus Bombast von Hohenheim, known as Paracelsus (par-ah-SEHL-sehs), was the only son of a physician, Wilhelm of Hohenheim, who came from a noble Swabian family whose original seat was at Hohenheim, near Stuttgart in northern Germany. Paracelsus’s mother, Els Ochsner, came from a family of peasants living on land belonging to the local Benedictine abbey, and she worked as a nurse’s aid. Because his illegitimate father had no legal right to the family heritage, Paracelsus was reared in poverty. Yet he said that his home environment was quiet and peaceful, although his mother apparently suffered from manic depression (bipolar disorder) and committed suicide when he was nine.

Following his wife’s death, Wilhelm and his son moved to Villach, Austria. Paracelsus probably attended the mining school of the Fuggers at nearby Hutenberg, where his father was a tutor. In Paracelsus’s writings, he pays generous tribute to his father, who played a large part in his son’s education. Paracelsus also states that he learned from experts, including bishops and an abbot. It is therefore likely that he received what was considered to be a universal education, including Kabbalistic, alchemical, and magical traditions, as well as orthodox religion and philosophy. It is clear, however, that Paracelsus neglected many of the formal aspects of his education. His Latin was not good, nor did he acquire elegance in speech and writing.

In 1507, at the age of fourteen, Paracelsus became a traveling student, attending universities in Germany, Italy, France, and Spain. He studied for a bachelor’s degree at Vienna between 1509 and 1511, and between 1513 and 1516, he traveled and studied medicine in Italy, notably at Ferrara. Yet he was a restless, pugnacious, and rebellious student, and he soon found himself completely dissatisfied with the education that was offered by the universities he attended. From 1517 to 1524, he again traveled extensively throughout Europe. He was employed as a military surgeon in Venice and was involved in three wars of the period. He traveled to Moscow when the grand duke Basil invited Western physicians and Humanists to the Russian court, accompanied a Tatar prince on a diplomatic mission to Constantinople, and visited the Holy Land and Alexandria. In all his journeys, Paracelsus was building the knowledge that would enable him to revolutionize many aspects of Renaissance medicine.

Life’s Work

With his fame spreading rapidly and many of his cures being regarded as miraculous, Paracelsus reached Salzburg in 1524. Yet the following year, he was arrested for siding with the peasants in the Peasants’ War of 1524-1526 and was forced to flee. In 1526, he arrived in Strasbourg and was entered in the city register as a surgeon. He apparently enjoyed great popularity there and was consulted by many prominent men. Yet he left after less than a year, for unknown reasons. During this period, he wrote eleven treatises on various diseases, ranging from tuberculosis to gout.

From Strasbourg, he traveled to Basel, where he cured the famous and influential printer Johann Froben. Through Froben, he was introduced to the intellectual elite of Basel, the result being his appointment as municipal physician and professor of medicine at Basel in March, 1527. This influential position proved to be the highlight of Paracelsus’s professional life. Yet he made no attempt to moderate his habitually aggressive and combative manner. He challenged the established medical system by saying that he would not accept the authority of Hippocrates or Galen. Instead, he would form his theories from his direct experience in dealing with the sick. In a famous incident, he put Avicenna’s classical works on medicine to the bonfire. The authorities retaliated by refusing him the right to lecture and disputing his medical qualifications. Yet Paracelsus continued his work. Defying all tradition, he lectured in German rather than Latin, and he drew large and appreciative audiences. Many were attracted by his credo: “The patients are your textbook, the sickbed is your study.”

Perhaps because Paracelsus had made so many enemies, his fortunes soon took a turn for the worse. His benefactor, Froben, died suddenly in October, and shortly afterward a malicious lampoon of Paracelsus appeared. He counterattacked in typical fashion, denouncing past authorities and his colleagues in extreme language: They were all liars, cheats, and fakes, according to him. The situation came to a head when Paracelsus accused the town magistrate of ignorance and bias after a legal suit in which Paracelsus had attempted to collect a promised fee from a patient he had cured. Facing arrest and severe punishment for insulting a high official and with most of the town against him, Paracelsus fled in February, 1528.

After this debacle, he embarked on a new set of journeys, to Alsace, Germany, Switzerland, Bohemia, and Austria, rarely staying more than a few months in one place. In 1529, he was in Nürnberg, but professional doors were closed to him. He responded by proposing to cure any patient who had been declared incurable, and he is reported to have succeeded in nine out of fifteen cases involving lepers. In Nürnberg, he also wrote much, particularly on the disease of syphilis, the most pressing medical problem of the day.

In 1530, he was in Beratzhausen, where he again wrote copiously, including one of his best-known works, the brief Das Buch Paragranum (1530; Against the Grain , 1894), in which he claimed that medicine should be based on four pillars: natural philosophy, astronomy, alchemy, and virtue. In 1531, he reached Saint Gall, where he wrote Opus paramirum (1531), which contains the fundamentals of his medical doctrine. During this period, he also focused strongly on the inner life, writing more than one hundred religious tracts, and he also took to religious preaching.

Facing poverty and adversity wherever he went, he came in 1533 to Appenzell, Switzerland, and to the mining districts of Hall and Schwaz, where he wrote a treatise on the miner’s disease the first ever written on an occupational disease. From Switzerland, he went again to Austria and in 1534 to Sterzing and Meran, living all the time like a beggar and rarely sleeping two nights in the same bed. In 1536, he was in Ulm and Augsburg, where his book on surgery, Grosse Wundarzney (1536; Great Surgery Book , 1894), was first printed; it said far more about how to avoid surgery than about surgery itself. In 1537, Paracelsus reached Munich and Bohemia, where he began work on his philosophical magnum opus, the Astronomia magna (1537-1538; Great Astronomy , 1894), which was an attempt to write a comprehensive system of natural philosophy. Highly eclectic but disorderly and inconsistent, it covers a vast range of topics, including humans and the universe, salvation, magical lore, such as the healing power of stones, physiognomy, phrenology, meteorology, and Paracelsus’s vision of the development of new technologies.

The best-known and most reliable likeness of Paracelsus, in a portrait by Augustin Hirschvogel, dates from 1537. It shows him clean-shaven and bald on the top of his head, with long unruly hair at the sides. Stern-faced, with deep-set eyes, his solemn expression tells the story of a hard but determined life. Of Paracelsus’s last three years, little is known. From August, 1540, he was again in Salzburg, summoned by Archbishop Prince Ernst of Bavaria. On September 21, 1541, he suffered a stroke and died three days later.

Significance

From Paracelsus’s own day to the present, a fierce debate has raged about his contribution to the development of Western science. Some people in his time denounced him as a charlatan, and his modern detractors have argued that his fame is more the result of his colorful and controversial life than any original contributions he made to human thought. On the other hand, his supporters argue that he was a great medical reformer who made substantial achievements in the development of modern chemistry, that he was the founder of biochemistry, and that he also made contributions to gynecology, psychiatry, and even psychotherapy.

In chemistry, it can certainly be said that he worked toward a systematic classification of all known chemical substances and that he devised a method of detoxifying dangerous chemical compounds, which he was then able to use for therapeutic purposes. He also introduced new laboratory methods. The methods of early chemists such as Andreas Libavius, Oswald Croll, and Jan Baptista van Helmont are clearly linked to those of Paracelsus. In medicine, he left accurate descriptions of diseases and had much success in the treating of wounds and chronic ulcers.

Yet if his contributions to modern knowledge are overemphasized, the picture of his work as a whole becomes distorted. He belongs firmly in the Renaissance. His belief in the correspondence between the microcosm and the macrocosm was a commonplace of the period, but it has been rejected by the modern world. Without it, however, much of Paracelsus’s work would become unintelligible. He always viewed humans in terms of their relationship with nature and the cosmos as a whole, believing that everything in the inner world corresponded to something in the outer world and that knowledge of this relationship was vital for the healer. The philosophical bases of his views were the esoteric systems of Gnosticism and Neoplatonism. It is this unique coexistence of contradictory elements in his thought, the ancient and the modern, that makes Paracelsus enduringly fascinating.

Bibliography

Debus, Allen G. The Chemical Philosophy: Paracelsian Science and Medicine in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries. Rev. ed. Mineola, N.Y.: Dover, 2002. Corrected edition of a seminal work in the study of Paracelsus, as a scientist and a philosopher of science who put his particular theoretical understanding of nature into scientific practice. Includes illustrations, bibliographic references, and index.

Grell, Ole Peter, ed. Paracelsus: The Man and His Reputation, His Ideas and Their Transformation. Boston: Brill, 1998. Collection of essays on the legacy and historical judgments of Paracelsus. Discusses his importance for medicine and science, his political appropriations, and the ways in which historians have variously interpreted his life. Includes illustrations, bibliographic references, and index.

Jung, Carl G. “Paracelsus” and “Paracelsus the Physician.” In The Spirit in Man, Art, and Literature. Translated by R. F. C. Hull. New York: Pantheon Books, 1966. The first essay is the text of an address delivered by Jung in 1929 at the house in Einsiedeln where Paracelsus was born. Some of the biographical information is inaccurate, but Jung’s insights into the essence of Paracelsus, although full of broad generalizations, remain valuable. The second, longer essay, originally given as a lecture in 1941, is one of the best short introductions in English to Paracelsus’s thought.

Pachter, Henry M. Magic into Science: The Story of Paracelsus. New York: Henry Schuman, 1951. A lively and very readable biography. Pachter tries to rescue Paracelsus from what he sees as an attempt by esoteric groups, including faith healers, mystics, occultists, and homeopaths, to claim Paracelsus as one of their own. Instead, Pachter gives most prominence to those aspects of Paracelsus’s work that show his contribution to the development of modern science, including chemistry, chemotherapy, biochemistry, gynecology, and psychiatry.

Pagel, Walter. Paracelsus: An Introduction to Philosophical Medicine in the Era of the Renaissance. New York: S. Karger, 1958. One of the best and most comprehensive examinations in English of Paracelsus’s work. Excellent on his philosophy, his medical theories and practice, and his sources. Resists viewing Paracelsus exclusively as a forerunner of modern science and medicine, and as a result serves as a useful corrective to Pachter. Instead, shows how Paracelsus forged mystical, magical, and scientific elements into a new synthesis based on personal experience.

Paracelsus. Selected Writings. 2d rev. ed. Edited with an introduction by Jolande Jacobi. Translated by Norbert Guterman. Reprint. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1988. One of the best anthologies in English of Paracelsus’s writings. Extracts from his works are arranged under thematic headings; references are comprehensive, although only German titles of the works are given. Jacobi’s introduction to Paracelsus’s life and work, from a Jungian point of view, contains valuable insights. The detailed glossary of Paracelsan terms is an exceptionally valuable aid to study. Includes many illustrations and a bibliography of primary and secondary sources.

Shumaker, Wayne. The Occult Sciences in the Renaissance: A Study in Intellectual Patterns. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1972. Extremely useful for understanding the intellectual and cultural milieu in which Paracelsus lived. Shumaker examines five areas of Renaissance thought: astrology, natural or white magic, witchcraft, alchemy, and the body of occult writings associated with the name Hermes Trismegistus. Includes extensive quotations from primary sources, many of which are unavailable in translation elsewhere, illustrations, and an annotated bibliography.

Weeks, Andrew. Paracelsus: Speculative Theory and the Crisis of the Early Reformation. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1997. This revisionist account of Paracelsus argues that he must be understood as much in terms of religion as in science. Places his scientific thought as a response to Reformation sectarian conflicts. Includes illustrations, bibliographic references, and index.

Williams, Gerhild Scholz, and Charles D. Gunnoe, Jr., eds. Paracelsian Moments: Science, Medicine, and Astrology in Early Modern Europe. Kirksville, Mo.: Truman State University Press, 2002. Wide-ranging anthology of essays on Paracelsus includes a study of his biography as written by his detractors, the role of gender in Paracelsus’s model of truth, and a study of Renaissance representations of magic and demonology. Illustrations, bibliographic references, and index.