PARACELSUS (1493/94–1541)

PARACELSUS (1493/94–1541), German physician and alchemist. Philippus Aureolus Theophrastus Bombastus von Hohenheim, who later gave himself the name Paracelsus, spent his early years in Einsiedeln (Switzerland) and Villach (Austria) before leaving home and wandering through much of Europe while visiting several universities. He gave his attention primarily to medicine but rejected ancient authorities in favor of a conception of medicine based in alchemical experience and a Hermetic view of nature. The principles of all things, Paracelsus believed, were the tria prima of salt, sulfur, and mercury, which separated initially from a prime matter, the mysterium arcanum, and gave rise thereafter to the four elements, described as the material wombs of all the earthly, watery, airy, and fiery parts of nature.

Around 1520 Paracelsus composed the Archidoxis (the title could be translated as Ancient Teaching, or Deepest Knowledge), which focused on the extraction of the "mysteries of nature" (qualities, virtues, powers) from natural things. After brief residences in Salzburg and Strasbourg his reputation as a physician brought him, in 1527, to Basel as city physician and university lecturer. His teaching in German, as opposed to traditional Latin, and his condemnation of traditional medical authorities, led to sharp confrontations with the Basel community of physicians and prompted his flight from the city in 1528. Soon thereafter he composed two works dealing with syphilis in which he spoke out against the use of guaiacum (the wood from a West Indian shrub, a monopoly on the importation of which was held by the Fugger trading dynasty) and recommended instead a medicament made from mercury.

Paracelsus described the discipline of medicine as resting upon four pillars, namely philosophy, astronomy, alchemy, and the virtue of the physician. True philosophy, he argued, began with a knowledge of the ars spagyria, the alchemical art of separation. In a work called Opus Paramirum (or Work Beyond Wonder), this concept played a central role in helping him formulate a new conception of disease. In contrast to traditional humoral pathology, Paracelsus argued that each organ of the body contained an archeus (a kind of guiding spirit or principle) which acted as an "inner alchemist" and provided for the proper functioning of the organ by separating that which was good or pure from that which was impure or unnecessary. In many cases of illness, he thought, the separating function of the archeus was disturbed. Moreover, just as everything in nature was born out of the three corporeal principles of salt, sulfur, and mercury, diseases of the body were also born into these three cosmogonic categories and represented themselves as saline (for example, outbreaks of the skin), sulfurous (inflammations or fevers), or mercurial (diseases associated with excess phlegm or fluid). Diseases were thus not consequences of general humoral imbalance, as depicted in Hippocratic and Galenic writing, but specific entities with individual etiologies and characteristics located within particular parts of the body. According to Paracelsus, specific remedies needed to match specific diseases, and physicians cured not by opposing qualities (hot to cold, or wet to dry) as in traditional therapies, but as a result of fashioning a medicine similar to the nature of the illness itself. Medicines could be prepared from anything, since the tria prima was to be found in every part of nature. The most effective medicaments, however, were prepared from minerals and metals, since these related best to the disease categories manifested as saline, sulfurous, or mercurial. In this way, like cured like. All of nature existed as a giant pharmacopoeia, and the alchemist-physician, guided by observation and experience, knew which of its parts related most closely to the various parts of the body. After selecting the appropriate material, the doctor needed to separate its purities from its impure and possibly poisonous parts. The spiritual powers thus extracted were then further ennobled and communicated as a medicine to a specific, diseased part of the body.

MICROCOSM AND MACROCOSM

The new therapy rested on what was actually a very old idea, namely that "the firmament is within man"; that is, there exist everywhere in nature analogies and correspondences between the macrocosm and the microcosm. Within this medical cosmology, Paracelsus believed that astral emanations impressed all earthly things and gave to them their divinely designated "signatures," the material indications showing which parts of the body (microcosm) they could serve best as medicaments. Comprising the being of every person, he thought, was the mortal life of the physical body, the immortal life that corresponded to the soul, and a life derived from the heavens and which corresponded to an "astral body" or "sidereal spirit"—the essential middle link between mind and matter. While not everything in nature possessed a divine soul, all things—plants, animals, minerals, and metals—did possess an astral body, which originated in the stars and which specified for all things their form and function. It was this spirit, or, as Paracelsus refers to it, this astra, that penetrated matter, giving life to all growing things, including minerals and metals. He regarded it as "the secret forger" from which proceeded every form and figure, and the source of the motions and directed actions that accounted for the vitality of the body. Because of the fall of Adam, impurities were mixed in with the astra, and these could sometimes also produce certain kinds of illness.

Since the human being was a condensation of the forces, elements, and creative principles of the entire universe, Paracelsus thought that an understanding of how the healthy universe of the body worked had to begin with an understanding of how the greater world functioned. The keys to doing this were to be found in philosophy and astronomy. Philosophy, however, was not the study of Aristotle, but the comprehension through experience of how the forces, virtues, and powers hidden in natural things operated to produce specific effects. Knowledge of astronomy was similarly based in experience of the world, being an understanding of how the powers and celestial virtues linked to the stars and planets affected the functioning of the human body.

Paracelsus's handbook of surgery, the Grosse Wundartzney, appeared at Augsburg in 1536. His Astronomia Magna, a summary of philosophical, anthropological, and cosmological opinions, was never finished, and other tracts representing his views in theology in addition to medicine and natural philosophy remained unpublished at the time of his death.

See also Alchemy ; Astrology ; Astronomy ; Hermeticism ; Medicine .

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Primary Sources

Paracelsus. Sämtliche Werke. Edited by Karl Sudhoff and Wilhelm Matthiessen, 1922–1933; rept. Hildesheim, 1996.

——. Sämtliche Werke: Zweite Abteilung: Theologische und Religionsphilosophische Scriften. Edited by Kurt Goldammer. Wiesbaden, 1955.

Secondary Sources

Goldammer, Kurt. Paracelsus: Natur und Offenbarung. Hannover-Kirchrode, 1953.

Grell, Ole Peter, ed. Paracelsus: The Man and His Reputation, His Ideas, and Their Transformation. Leiden, 1998.

Pagel, Walter. Paracelsus. Basel, 1958.

Bruce T. Moran

Philippus Aureolus Paracelsus

The Swiss doctor and alchemist Philippus Aureolus Paracelsus (1493-1541) is noted for opposing Galen's medical theories and for founding medical chemistry.

The real name of Philippus Aureolus Paracelsus was Theophrastus Bombastus von Hohenheim. He was born in Einsiedeln. His father instructed him in Latin, botany, chemistry, and the history of religion. When Theophrastus was 9, his father was appointed town physician at Villach, and the boy attended the mining school there. For his secondary education he went to Basel. Through visits to Italy he learned of classical medical theory; after studies in the faculty of arts at the University of Vienna, he went back to Italy, receiving his doctorate in medicine from the University of Ferrara in 1515. During this Ferrara period he took the name Paracelsus.

Paracelsus resumed his study of metals briefly at Schwatz in the Tirol and then began a series of travels that lasted, almost without exception, to the end of his life. He served as an army physician in Denmark from 1518 to 1521, and the following year he joined the Venetian military forces. By 1526 Paracelsus had settled at Tübingen and gathered around him a small group of students. Later that year he was on the road again, this time to Strassburg, where he bought his citizenship and apparently intended to settle down.

During all these travels, Paracelsus was spreading the anti-Aristotelian position that the four elements (earth, air, fire, and water) were composed of primary principles: a fireproducing principle (sulfur), a principle of liquidity (mercury), and a principle of solidity (salt). From a medical viewpoint, salt was thought to be a cleanser, sulfur a consuming agent, and mercury a transporter of the product of consumption. Shaping the normal healthy organism is a principle called an archeus. When an imbalance occurs among the three principles in man, there is disease, and the office of the doctor is to help the archeus by supplying the right medicines. Advocating the treatment of like by like, Paracelsus therapy is thus homeopathic in theory. During his travels he acquired a reputation as a healer; all his practical success would support his theory of the three principles.

In 1526 Paracelsus was summoned to Basel to treat a patient, and he remained on as town physician, a post that included a lectureship at the university and supervision of the apothecaries. His lectures drew large audiences, but his teaching and style were unpopular with the authorities. He openly challenged the traditional books on medicine and the teaching of medicine by textual analysis; he preferred to lecture in German rather than Latin; he refused to prescribe the medicines of the local apothecaries; and, though sympathetic with some of the ideas of the Reformation, he was a Roman Catholic. In 1528 Paracelsus had to flee to escape arrest and imprisonment.

Shortly before the flight from Basel, Paracelsus completed the most important of his earlier works, Nine Books of Archidoxus, a reference manual on secret remedies. Between 1530 and 1534 he wrote his bestknown works, the Paragranum and the Paramirum, both dealing with cosmology. He returned to medical writing with the Books of the Greater Surgery in editions of 1536 and 1537; this was his only work that was a publishing success. The Astronomia magna, done between 1537 and 1539, shows his most mature thinking about nature and man.

Paracelsus claimed that the pillars of his outlook on the world were philosophy, astronomy, alchemy, and virtue. It might be convenient to sample this outlook by emphasizing only alchemy here. For Paracelsus, alchemy was not only an earthly science but a spiritual one, requiring moral virtue on the part of the knower. At his highest, such a knower was not a theoretician but an activist; Paracelsus emphasized wisdom as practical rather than contemplative.

Paracelsus believed that to every evil there was a counteracting good and to every disease, a cure. He valued alchemy not because it might turn baser metals into gold, but because it might discover the means of restoring youth and prolonging life. He was looking for something like an elixir. Yet alchemy was not restricted to the chemist; it was at work in the whole of nature. Relating his natural philosophy to his religious beliefs, he pointed out that Christ came not as a scholar or a philosopher but as a healer. Many of Christ's miracles were healings of the sick. Most importantly, he healed the wounds of sin. Alchemy thus provided Paracelsus with a natural philosophy and a view of Christianity.

Paracelsus underscored the relation between the macrocosm and the microcosm as an argument for going to nature to understand man. According to his macrocosm-microcosm theory, "Everything that astronomical theory has profoundly fathomed by studying the planetary objects and the stars…can also be applied to the firmament of the body." The physician is the god of the microcosm. Such was the cosmology which Paracelsus espoused.

During the post-Basel period and especially after 1531, Paracelsus appears to have undergone a spiritual conversion which prompted him to renounce material possessions. In 1534 he came as a beggar and tramp, to use his own words, to Innsbruck, Vipiteno, and Merano. The plague was raging in these cities, and he ministered to the victims. In this new spirit that animated him, Paracelsus was especially attentive to the poor and the needy. He tended to a more mystical view of man and especially of the physician. He had long stressed a so-called light of nature, which was human reason. He thought that such a light was a radiation of the Holy Spirit.

In 1540 Paracelsus arrived in Salzburg a sick man, and he died there on Sept. 24, 1541.

Further Reading

Many of Paracelsus' own writings are gathered in Jolande Jacobi, ed., Paracelsus: Selected Writings, translated by Norbert N. Guterman (2d ed. 1958). Biographies of his life and work include Anna M. Stoddart, The Life of Paracelsus (1911); John Maxson Stillman, Theophrastus Bombastus von Hohenheim Called Paracelsus (1920); John Hargrave, The Life and Soul of Paracelsus (1951); Henry M. Pachter, Paracelsus: Magic into Science (1951), and Sidney Rosen, Doctor Paracelsus (1959). □

Paracelsus

GERMAN PHYSICIAN, ALCHEMIST, AND SCIENTIST
1493–1541

Paracelsus was born Theophrastus Bombastus von Hohenheim. He was a contemporary of Martin Luther and Nicolaus Copernicus. He adopted his

pseudonym based on his assertion that he was a better physician than Celsus, the first century c.e. Roman author on medicine acclaimed in Renaissance Europe (he was "Para-Celsus," or beyond Celsus). His self-promotion as "The Most Highly Experienced and Illustrious Physician … " has given us the word "bombastic," derived from his birth name.

Paracelsus gained his early medical knowledge from his father, who was a physician. He followed this education with formal medical training at the University of Ferrara in Italy. Finding his formal training disappointing, Paracelsus embarked on a life of travel and study combined with medical practice. According to Paracelsus, he collected medical knowledge anywhere he could find it without regard to academic authority. He acknowledged his consultations with peasants, barbers, chemists, old women, quacks, and magicians. Paracelsus developed his notions of disease and treatment away from any established medical faculty and promoted the idea that academic medical training had reached a state deeply in need of reform.

Paracelsus believed in the four "Aristotelian" elements of earth, air, fire, and water. His medical theory was based on the notion that earth is the fundamental element of existence for humans and other living things. Paracelsus believed that earth generated all living things under the rule of three "principles": salt, sulfur, and mercury. He therefore believed these substances to be very potent as chemical reactants, as poisons, and as medical treatments. (Indeed, salt and sulfur can yield strong mineral acids, for example, hydrochloric acid and sulfuric acid, and mercury is a strong poison.) Finally, Paracelsus believed in the "Philosopher's Stone." The Philosopher's Stone (which he sometimes claimed to possess) was supposed to cure all ills and to enable the transformation of any metal into gold. Such a stone, it was believed, would be the strongest chemical reactant and the strongest medicine possible.

Paracelsus advocated the direct observation of a patient's medical condition and the assessment of his or her surroundings. He was one of the first physicians to describe occupational diseases. He described several lung diseases of miners and recommended improved ventilation as a means of their prevention. He emphasized that the legitimacy of a treatment was whether or not it worked, not its recommendation by an ancient authority in an ancient text. Paracelsus promoted the use of mineral treatments. Because small amounts of mercury salts were effective against some illnesses, these medicines were judged to be very strong.

Paracelsus's exalted claims for himself and his abrasive personality often brought him into conflict with civil authorities. His methods of trial and error and observation led him to reject the use of sacred relics as medical treatment. It brought him into conflict with religious authorities. His calls for reformation of the medical profession offended medical authorities. As a consequence he was on the move often. Paracelsus held an academic post only once, and it lasted only a year. Although he wrote a great deal, only one of his manuscripts was published in his lifetime. Most of his manuscripts were left in a variety of cities and were published several years after his death. Within these manuscripts are inconsistencies and contradictions. Paracelsus never established any one strong school of thought or medical practice. He did, however, influence future generations of iatrochemists (physicianchemists, iatro being Greek for "physician"), who continued to apply chemistry to questions of medical practice.

see also Alchemy.

David A. Bassett

Bibliography

Jacobi, Jolande, ed. (1942, reprint 1988). Paracelsus, Selected Writings, tr. Norbert Gutman. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

Partington, J. R. (1961). A History of Chemistry, Vol. 2. New York: Martino Publishing.

Sigerist, Henry E., ed. (1941, reprint 1996). Paracelsus: Four Treatises. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.

Paracelsus (1493–1541)

Germany physician and alchemist who pioneered a new approach to treating illness, and helped usher medicine out of its medieval occultism and into the more rational scientific philosophies of the Renaissance. The son of a physician, his given name was Philippus Aureolus Theophrastus Bombast von Hohenheim. He was born and raised in the town of Einsiedeln in what is now Switzerland and spent several years wandering to the far corners of the known world to learn from philosophers, scientists, and doctors from Europe to Arabia and India. He studied in several universities, poring over the medical texts of the ancient writers and exploring the alchemical tracts of medieval writers. His studies and experiments led him to the conclusion that all matter derived from three basic substances—salt, sulfur, and mercury—that originated in a matter known as mysterium arcanum.

Paracelsus rejected the traditional practices of physicians, who in his day worked to rid the body of impurities through bleeding and purging. In his book Archidoxis, he explained his theory that certain essential qualities all derive from substances found in nature. He believed that philosophy, astronomy, alchemy, and virtue were all necessary to the work of a doctor, and that disease represented a malfunction of the body and not, as was traditional, the imbalance of the bodily humors. He elaborated his ideas in another major work, Opus Paramirum, or Work Beyond Wonder, which also explained the organs of the body as containing a guiding spirit that separated good qualities from bad. To cure disease, the physician needed to apply a substance manufactured from minerals, metals, or other compounds that was proper to the functioning of the diseased organ and could mimic the body's natural balancing action.

Paracelsus saw man as a microcosm of the universe, a being in which all the qualities found in nature had their counterparts on the human scale. The physical body, the soul, and an astral body were present, in which the latter spirit—which originated in the heavens—served as a blueprint for the form and function of all things and as an important link between the mind, the body, and the spiritual world. For this reason, the study of both human philosophy and scientific astronomy were needed for a physician to truly understand the workings and diseases of the body.

In 1524 Paracelsus became a lecturer and physician in the city of Basel, where his strange new ideas and his teaching in German instead of traditional Latin sparked bitter conflict with his physician rivals and quickly drove him from the city. In 1536 he published a handbook of surgery, Der Grossen Wundartzney. He died five years later under mysterious circumstances, with many historians believing that he was poisoned by rivals.

See Also: medicine

Philippus Aureolus Paracelsus , 1493?–1541, Swiss physician and alchemist. His original name Theophrastus Bombastus von Hohenheim. He traveled widely, acquiring knowledge of alchemy, chemistry, and metallurgy, and although his egotism and his contempt for traditional theories earned him the enmity of his learned contemporaries, he gained wide popularity among the people (he lectured and wrote in German rather than Latin) and had great influence in his own and succeeding centuries. In Salzburg, where he died, a statue was erected to him in 1752.

His thought was colored by the fantastic philosophies of his time and he based his medical theories on the concept of human beings as microcosms of the universe. He was firmly opposed to the humoral theory of disease championed by Galen , and he advocated the use of specific remedies for specific diseases, introducing many chemicals (e.g., laudanum, mercury, sulfur, iron, and arsenic) into use as medicines. He also noted relationships such as the hereditary pattern in syphilis and the association of cretinism with endemic goiter and of paralysis with head injuries. Paracelsus wrote numerous medical and occult works containing a curious mixture of sound observation and mystical jargon. His work On Diseases of Miners was the first study devoted to an occupational disease.

Bibliography: See Four Treatises of Theophrastus von Hohenheim (ed. by H. E. Sigerist, 1941); biographies by W. Pagel (2d ed. 1982) and C. Webster (2008).

Paracelsus ( Theophrast Bombast Von Hohenheim) (1493–1541). wiss-born physician. He was attracted to alchemy, astrology, and mysticism, and flouted the traditional methods of Avicenna and Galen. Although frequently labelled a charlatan, he had many followers and exerted considerable influence, particularly through the Rosicrucian movement. This mythological machinery was borrowed by Pope, via the Rosicrucians, in The Rape of the Lock. Paracelsus was the subject of a poem by Browning (below).

Paracelsus (c.1493–1541), Swiss physician: born Theophrastus Phillipus Aureolus Bombastus von Hohenheim. He developed a new approach to medicine and philosophy based on observation and experience. He saw illness as having a specific external cause (rather than an imbalance of the bodily humours), and introduced chemical remedies to replace traditional ones. Paracelsus's progressive view was offset by his overall occultist perspective.

Paracelsus, a dramatic poem in blank verse by R. Browning, published 1835. The career of the historical Paracelsus serves Browning, despite his claim to the contrary, as a stalking-horse for his own exploration of the processes of the creative imagination, in particular the conflict between ‘Love’ (self-forgetting) and ‘Knowledge’ (self-assertion) in the mind of the artist.

Paracelsus (1493–1541) Swiss physician and alchemist, real name Philippus Aureolus Theophrastus Bombast von Hohenheim. According to Paracelsus, the human body primarily consists of salt, sulphur, and mercury, and it is the separation of these elements that causes illness. He introduced mineral baths and made opium, mercury, lead and various minerals part of the pharmacopoeia.

Paracelsus. The name used by Theophrast Bombast von Hohenheim (1493–1541), Swiss physician. He elaborated a mystical theosophy on a Neoplatonic basis; he held that, just as we know nature only to the extent that we are ourselves nature, so we know God only in so far as we are God.

Paracelsus ( Theophrastus Baumastus von Hohenheim, 1493–1541). Alchemist and physician. He was born in Switzerland and travelled extensively throughout Europe, gaining a reputation as the leading figure in the Renaissance quest for interior meanings and transformations of nature.

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