Paracelsus

1493?-1541

Swiss Physician, Pharmacologist and Alchemist

Paracelsus was arguably the most innovative medical mind of the Renaissance. Some denounced him as a charlatan (one who merely pretends to possess knowledge or skill) because of his devotion to magic and the occult. But other scholars agree that he accomplished too much in too many genuinely scientific fields for this accusation to make sense. In an age when authority was expected to remain unquestioned, Paracelsus rejected authority and conducted his own investigations. His iconoclasm inspired Canadian physician Sir William Osler (1849-1919) to dub him "the Luther of medicine."

Paracelsus was born in Einsiedeln, Switzerland, the only son of Wilhelm von Hohenheim, a poor country physician. His real name was Philipp Aureolus Theophrastus Bombast von Hohenheim. He created the pseudonym Paracelsus by combining the Greek prefix para-, meaning "beside" or "beyond," with the name of a great Roman physician, Aulus Aurelius Cornelius Celsus (25 B.C.-A.D. 50).

After the death of his mother, Theophrastus (as he was called) and his father moved in 1502 to Villach, Austria. Theophrastus attended the Bergschule in Villach, where his father taught chemistry and where students learned the properties of metals and the economics of mining. He served as an apprentice to his father in medicine and studied the works in his father's library. In 1507 he began his life of wandering. Eager for both knowledge and adventure, he traveled widely, briefly studying at several German universities. Around 1510 he may have received a bachelor's degree from the University of Vienna. In 1513 he enrolled at the University of Ferrara, Italy, where he may have received an M.D. degree in either 1515 or 1516. However, academic life and its pretensions disturbed him. He claimed that the true student should seek knowledge from sorcerers, nomads, thieves, and peasants, as well as from professors, and should travel in order to keep from stagnating. His journeys extended into England, Africa, and Asia. While in England, he claimed he could learn more in a Cornwall mine than at Oxford or Cambridge.

Paracelsus discarded all previous medical systems and held Arabic medicine in particular contempt. To promote his lectures at the University of Basel, Switzerland, in 1527, he publicly burned the works of the acclaimed physicians Galen (129-c. 216) and Avicenna (980-1037). Through alchemy, he experimented with therapeutic applications of metallurgy and chemistry that would later develop into iatrochemistry and eventually into modern chemotherapy.

Some of the ancients believed that disease resulted from disturbances in the body's four humors: yellow bile, black bile, phlegm, and blood, which corresponded to the four elements, temperaments, and seasons. Choleric yellow bile was hot and dry like fire and summer; melancholic black bile was dry and cold like earth and autumn; impassive phlegm was cold and moist like water and winter; and sanguine blood was moist and hot like air and spring. It was believed that all four humors should be in balance in order to ensure good health. Paracelsus renounced this traditional humoral theory and instead attributed the onset of disease to environmental factors such as contagion, the pathogenicity of chemicals, and geographic location.

Paracelsus wrote much, but few of his writings were published during his lifetime. He left manuscripts behind him wherever he went. Thus many of his works were published posthumouslyand probably many more were lost. His Grosse Wund Artzney (Great Surgery) (1536), soon translated into Latin as Chirurgia magna, offers a detailed analysis of gunshot wounds and argues against treating them with hot oil, which was common among military surgeons before the work of the French surgeon Ambroise Paré (1510?-1590). (Paré discovered the therapeutic value of simple dressings and soothing ointments for wounds.) Von der frantzüsischen Kranckheit (1553) contains Paracelsus's studies of syphilis, which he called "French disease" or "French gonorrhea." He advocated mercury for its cure. In De gradibus (1562) he detailed most of his important improvements in drug therapy. One of the first books on occupational health hazards was Von der Bergsucht oder Bergkrankheiten (1567), which focuses on the diseases of miners. In Von den Kranckheyten so die Vernunfft berauben als da sein (1567), he rejected the popular notion that unwelcome mental states were caused by demons and described psychiatric disorders in terms of purely physical occurrences. In De generatione stultorum (1603), he revealed the association of cretinism with endemic goiter.

There is no reason to discount the standard view that Paracelsus was a coarse and brutish man. Sometime before 1524, he acquired a gigantic broadsword that he carried for the rest of his life, even sleeping with it. He supposedly hid his personal supply of laudanum in a secret compartment in its hilt. He died mysteriously in Salzburg, Austria, perhaps as the result of a bar fight.

This is the complete article, containing 786 words (approx. 3 pages at 300 words per page).