Paracelsus: a Swiss physician and alchemist of the sixteenth century
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Paracelsus was a scientist of immense learning and experience who had the courage to challenge the limitations of the science of his time.
Paracelsus: a Swiss physician and alchemist of the sixteenth century
Paracelsus was a scientist of immense learning and experience who had the courage to challenge the limitations of the science of his time.
A brief biography of Paracelsus
Paracelsus's real name was Theophrastus Bombastus von Hohenheim. He was born in Einsiedeln on 14 November 1493. It was in his hometown that he received his first lessons in medicine from his father. He attended various medical universities and eventually graduated from Ferrara.
His life was extremely eventful, and many of its episodes were embellished by Paracelsus himself. What is certain is his experience as a military physician during the first Venetian war and other military campaigns, including those in Denmark and Sweden. After travelling from city to city, Paracelsus died in Salzburg on 24 September 1541.
Quotes and sayings: it is the dose that makes the poison
To get to know Paracelsus more closely, let his own writings speak:
"All things are poison, and nothing exists without poison. Only the dose determines that a poison has no effect."
"He is not a physician who can see only what is visible to any boor. The skilled gardener, looking at a seed, can say what kind of plant will grow from it, and equally the physician should be capable of perceiving how diseases originate and in what manner they will develop (…) he who knows the origin of rain also knows the origin of dysentery; he who knows the origin of winds also knows that of colic; he who knows the periodic influences of the seasons can know the origin of intermittent fevers; the true physician studies the causes of diseases by studying universal man. Within him exist all the diseases that existed in the past and will exist in the future."
Yet the thinking of Paracelsus was still influenced by the strong religiosity of his era:
"It is neither the devil nor the physician who heals, but only God through medicine."
The thought of Paracelsus
Paracelsus's conception of the world and of medicine was extraordinarily ahead of its time. His restless existence, which took him from his native Switzerland through France, Spain, the Netherlands, Denmark, Sweden, England, Poland, Russia, many other regions of Eastern Europe and even India, enriched him with a practical experience that always led him to hold in greater regard the traditional knowledge of ordinary women of the people than the wisdom taught at universities.
The brilliant and, at the time, incomprehensible results he achieved through wholly unusual healing methods — to which was added a powerful personal magnetism capable of positively influencing patients towards recovery — together with his irascible character and irregular way of life, earned him the hostility and discrediting of the medical establishment of his day.
Paracelsus was firmly convinced that the forces of the firmament flowed both physically and psychologically upon human beings, and that man ought to make use of various sciences, including astronomy, understood as knowledge of the relationship between the stars and human beings. Man is the microcosm that contains within himself something of all the creatures that exist in the Universe (the macrocosm):
"there is nothing in heaven or on Earth that does not also exist in man, and God, who is in heaven, also exists in man, and the two are One."
The practical application of astronomy is called by Paracelsus magic, understood as spiritual knowledge of both visible and invisible nature, and regarded as an art in that it cannot be learned from books but must be acquired through practical experience.