Paracelsus 1493 – 1541

Theophrastus von Hohenheim, who took the Latinized name Paracelsus, was a Swiss-German physician, alchemist, and natural philosopher and one of the principal figures in the early-modern revolt against Galenic medicine. He worked as an army surgeon, mining doctor, and itinerant healer across Europe, and was briefly municipal physician and lecturer at Basel until his attacks on the medical establishment forced him to flee. His extensive writings on medicine, alchemy, and natural philosophy introduced systematic chemical remedies, the doctrine of the dose, and an organic natural philosophy that influenced later Renaissance thought from Bohme through Goethe.

Theophrastus von Hohenheim, who took the name Paracelsus, was born in December 1493 at Einsiedeln in Switzerland, the son of a Swabian physician. He studied at Basel and at Italian universities, perhaps taking a doctorate at Ferrara, and then spent more than a decade as an army surgeon and wandering practitioner across Europe and parts of the Near East. Appointed town physician at Basel in 1527 by the Reformer Oecolampadius, he scandalised the medical faculty by burning the canon of Avicenna and Galen in public and by lecturing in German rather than Latin; within a year he was forced to resume his wandering life.

His enormous output includes the Volumen Paramirum (1520), Opus Paramirum (1530), the surgical handbook Die grosse Wundarznei (1536), Astronomia Magna (composed 1537–1538), the Archidoxis, the Liber de Nymphis Sylphis Pygmaeis et Salamandris on elemental spirits, and the Philosophia sagax. Most was published only after his death by editors such as Johannes Huser.

Paracelsus replaced the four humours with a chemical medicine — iatrochemistry — in which the body is governed by the three principles of sulphur, mercury, and salt; he treated specific diseases with mineral remedies, regarded the human being as a microcosm answering to the cosmic macrocosm, and combined his natural philosophy with alchemy, astrology, and a lay piety. He died at Salzburg in September 1541.