Paracelsus

Paracelsus was known for kindling controversies. On June 24, 1527, Paracelsus burned the books written by the Arab physician Avicenna and the Greek physician Galen in front of the university which reminded the people of Dr. Martin Luther who burnt a papal bull threatening excommunication in front of the Elster Gate in Wittenberg, Germany on December 10, 1520.

Paracelsus died on September 24, 1541 in Salzburg, Austria at the age of 47 after a brief illness while visiting Prince Palatine, the Duke Ernst of Bavaria.

His most important legacy is the criticism of the scholastic teachings in science, medicine and theology. Though his theories do not match modern thinking on scientific matters, they were responsible for bringing a more dynamic approach to scientific methods in treating patients having physical or mental illnesses.

Paracelsus was born Philippus Aureolus Theophrastus Bombastus von Hohenheimin Sihlbrucke near Einsiendeln, Switzerland on December 17, 1493.

His father was an impoverished Swabian doctor and chemist named Wilhelm Bombast von Hohenheim who served as a physician at the Benedictine abbey in Einsiedeln.His mother was a Swiss woman named Elsa Oschner, a bondswoman in the abbey of Einsiedeln.

He was known as Theophrastus in his childhood and was nine years old when his mother died.

After his mother’s death, he and his father moved to Villach, Carinthia, which was located in Southern Austria in 1502. He was taught medicine, botany and mineralogy by his father who looked after the inhabitants of the cloister and the pilgrims who came there. He also received a lot of theological knowledge from the clerics of ‘St. Paul’s Abbey’ in Lavanttal and its convent school.

In Villach he attended the ‘Bergschule’ where young students were trained to become overseers and analysts for supervising mining operations involving gold, iron, mercury, tin, alum and copper-sulphate ores. This school, where his father also taught chemical theory and its practice, had been set up by a family of wealthy bankers named Fuggers.

After obtaining his doctoral degree Paracelsus set out on a journey throughout Europe, which covered Denmark, Sweden, Holland, Germany, France, Spain, Hungary, Poland, England, Scotland, Ireland, Prussia and Tartary.

He was taken a captive by the Tartars when he went to Russia later. He escaped from them and fled to Lithuania and then to Hungary in the south.

In 1521 he joined the Venetian army as an army surgeon and travelled through Arabia, Egypt, the Holy Land and finally came to Constantinople.

Wherever he went, he met and talked with the experts and knowledgeable people who could teach him more about practical alchemy and learnt the most effective ways to treat patients as well as using the latent forces in nature to cure them.

In 1524 Paracelsus returned to Villach and was appointed as the town physician because of his various miraculous cures which the people already knew about. He was also made a lecturer of medicine at the ‘University of Basel’ in Switzerland. Students from all over Europe attended his classes on medicine. He reached the peak of his career while at Basel where he denounced the use of ineffective pills, potions, salves, balms and other things that prevented nature from healing wounds.

He wrote a clinical description of syphilis in 1530 where he stated that the disease could be treated by the intake of compounds of mercury in measured quantities.

In 1536 Paracelsus published a book on surgery titled ‘Der grossen Wundartzney’ which was the first of its kind in that period. It helped him get back the reputation he had enjoyed at the ‘University of Basel’.

Most of Paracelsus’s work was considered to be improper and did not conform to existing standards but in 1618 the ‘Royal College of Physicians’ in London finally published a new Pharmacopeia that contained some of the remedies suggested by him.