Paracelsus

The Evolution of Modern Medicine
by William Osler

(Page 6 of 16)

PARACELSUS is "der Geist der stets verneint." He roused men against the dogmatism of the schools, and he stimulated enormously the practical study of chemistry. These are his great merits, against which must be placed a flood of hermetical and transcendental medicine, some his own, some foisted in his name, the influence of which is still with us.

"With what judgment ye judge it shall be judged to you again" is the verdict of three centuries on Paracelsus. In return for unmeasured abuse of his predecessors and contemporaries he has been held up to obloquy as the arch-charlatan of history. We have taken a cheap estimate of him from Fuller and Bacon, and from a host of scurrilous scribblers who debased or perverted his writings. Fuller picked him out as exemplifying the drunken quack, whose body was a sea wherein the tide of drunkenness was ever ebbing and flowing - "He boasted that shortly he would order Luther and the Pope, as well as he had done Galen and Hippocrates. He was never seen to pray, and seldom came to Church. He was not only skilled in natural magic (the utmost bounds whereof border on the suburbs of hell) but is charged to converse constantly with familiars. Guilty he was of all vices but wantonness: . . . "

To the mystics, on the other hand, he is Paracelsus the Great, the divine, the most supreme of the Christian magi, whose writings are too precious for science, the monarch of secrets, who has discovered the Universal Medicine. This is illustrated in Browning's well-known poem "Paracelsus," published when he was only twenty-one; than which there is no more pleasant picture in literature of the man and of his aspirations. His was a "searching and impetuous soul" that sought to win from nature some startling secret - ". . . a tincture of force to flush old age with youth, or breed gold, or imprison moonbeams till they change to opal shafts!" At the same time with that capacity for self-deception which characterizes the true mystic he sought to cast

Light on a darkling race; save for that doubt,
I stood at first where all aspire at last
To stand: the secret of the world was mine.
I knew, I felt (perception unexpressed,
Not comprehended by our narrow thought,
But somehow felt and known in every shift
And change in the spirit, - nay, in every pore
Of the body, even) - what God is, what we are,
What life is - . . .

Much has been done of late to clear up his story and his character. Professor Sudhoff, of Leipzig, has made an exhaustive bibliographical study of his writings, there have been recent monographs by Julius Hartmann, and Professors Franz and Karl Strunz, and a sympathetic summary of his life and writings has been published by the late Miss Stoddart. Indeed there is at present a cult of Paracelsus. The hermetic and alchemical writings are available in English. The main facts of his life you can find in all the biographies. Suffice it here to say that he was born at Einsiedeln, near Zurich, in 1493, the son of a physician, from whom he appears to have had his early training both in medicine and in chemistry. Under the famous abbot and alchemist, Trithemiusof Wurzburg, he studied chemistry and occultism. After working in the mines at Schwatz he began his wanderings, during which he professes to have visited nearly all the countries in Europe and to have reached India and China.

Returning to Germany he began a triumphal tour of practice through the German cities, always in opposition to the medical faculty, and constantly in trouble. He undoubtedly performed many important cures, and was thought to have found the supreme secret of alchemistry. In the pommel of his sword he was believed to carry a familiar spirit. So dominant was his reputation that in 1527 he was called to the chair of physic in the University of Basel. Embroiled in quarrels after his first year he was forced to leave secretly, and again began his wanderings through German cities, working, quarrelling, curing, and dying prematurely at Saltzburg in 1541 - one of the most tragic figures in the history of medicine.

Paracelsus is the Luther of medicine, the very incarnation of the spirit of revolt. At a period when authority was paramount, and men blindly followed old leaders, when to stray from the beaten track in any field of knowledge was a damnable heresy, he stood out boldly for independent study and the right of private judgment. After election to the chair at Basel he at once introduced a startling novelty by lecturing in German. He had caught the new spirit and was ready to burst all bonds both in medicine and in theology. He must have startled the old teachers and practitioners by his novel methods. "On June 5, 1527, he attached a program of his lectures to the black-board of the University inviting all to come to them. It began by greeting all students of the art of healing. He proclaimed its lofty and serious nature, a gift of God to man, and the need of developing it to new importance and to new renown.

This he undertook to do, not retrogressing to the teaching of the ancients, but progressing whither nature pointed, through research into nature, where he himself had discovered and had verified by prolonged experiment and experience. He was ready to oppose obedience to old lights as if they were oracles from which one did not dare to differ. Illustrious doctor smight be graduated from books, but books made not a single physician. Neither graduation, nor fluency, nor the knowledge of old languages, nor the reading of many books made a physician, but the knowledge of things themselves and their properties. The business of a doctor was to know the different kinds of sicknesses, their causes, their symptoms and their right remedies. This he would teach, for he had won this knowledge through experience, the greatest teacher, and with much toil.

He would teach it as he had learned it, and his lectures would be founded on works which he had composed concerning inward and external treatment, physic and surgery." Shortly afterwards, at the Feast of St. John, the students had a bonfire in front of the university. Paracelsus came out holding in his hands the "Bible of medicine," Avicenna's "Canon," which he flung into the flames saying: "Into St. John's fire so that all misfortune may go into the air with the smoke." It was, as he explained afterwards, a symbolic act: "What has perished must go to the fire; it is no longer fit for use: what is true and living, that the fire cannot burn." With abundant confidence in his own capacity he proclaimed himself the legitimate monarch, the very Christ of medicine. "You shall follow me," cried he, "you, Avicenna, Galen, Rhasis, Montagnana, Mesues; you, Gentlemen of Paris, Montpellier, Germany, Cologne, Vienna, and whomsoever the Rhine and Danube nourish; you who inhabit the isles of the sea; you, likewise, Dalmatians, Athenians; thou, Arab; thou, Greek; thou, Jew; all shall follow me, and the monarchy shall be mine."

About the Author

William Osler (1849 - 1919) was a Canadian physician. He has been called one of the greatest icons of modern medicine and the Father of Modern Medicine (which is what he himself considered Avicenna to be).