WHO WAS PARACELSUS?

Paracelsus, byname of Philippus Aureolus Theophrastus Bombastus Von Hohenheim (Nov11/Dec17 1493-Sept 24, 1541) was born and raised in the village of Einsiedeln in Switzerland. Around 1529, he officially adopted the name Paracelsus (above or beyond Celsus), reflecting the fact that he regarded his views as even greater than Aulus Cornelius Celsus, a renowed 1st century Roman medical writer.
He was the only son of Wilhelm Bombast Von Hohenhein, a Swabian (German) chemist and physician. His mother was a Swiss and presumably died in his childhood. In 1502 the family moved to Vilach, Carinthia in Southern Austria, where his father worked as a physician, attending to the medical needs of the pilgrims. Paracelsus attended the Berg'Schule, founded by the wealthy Fugger family of merchant bankers of Augs'Burg, where his father taught chemical theory and practice, and at home,
Paracelsus was educated by his father in botany, medicine, mineralogy, and natural philosophy.
Youngsters were trained at the Berg'Schule as oversees and analysts for mining operations in gold, tin, and mercury, as well as in iron, copper, alum, and copper-sulfate ores.
The young Paracelsus learned of metals that grow in the earth, watched the transformations of metallic constituents in smelting vats, and the transmutation of lead into gold, a conversion believed to be possible by the alchemists of the time. Those experiences gave Paracelsus insight into metallurgy and chemistry, which likely laid the foundations of his later remarkable discoveries in the field of chemotherapy.
In 1507 he joined the many wandering youths who traveled throughout Europe seeking famous teachers at one university after another. He is said to have attended the universities of Basel, Tubingen, Vienna, Witten'Berg, Leipzig. Heidel'Berg, and Cologne during the next 5 years but was disappointed with them all. He wrote later that he wondered how "the high colleges managed to produce so many high asses," a typical Paracelsian jibe. He upset the traditional attitudes of schoolmen. He wrote, "the universities do not teach all things, so a doctor must seek out old wives, gypsies, sorcerers, wandering tribes, old robbers, and such outlaws and take lessons from them. A doctor must be a traveller ... Knowledge is experience." Paracelsus held that the crude language of the innkeeper, the barber, and the teamster had more real dignity and common sense than the dry scholasticism of Aristotle, Galen of Pergamum, and Avicenna, the recognized Greek and Arab medical authorities of his day.
He received also a profound humanistic and theological education from local clerics and the convent school of St. Paul's Abbey in the Lavanttal. He specifically accounts for being tutored by Johannes Trithemius, abbot of Sponheim.
- Johannes Trithemius (1February1462-13December 1516) was a German Benedictine abbot and a polymath (having learned much) active in the German Renaissance as a lexicographer, chronicler, cryptographer, and paranormal knowledge. His students included Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa and Paracelsus. When he was still an infant his father died. His stepfather was hostile to education and thus Johannes could only learn in secrecy and with many difficulties. He learned Greek, Latin, and Hebrew. When he was 17 years old he escaped from his home and wandered around looking for good teachers, traveling to Trier, Cologne, the Netherlands and Heidelberg.
The byname Trithemius refers to his native town of Trittenheim on the Moselle River, at the time part of the Electorate of Trier. It was an ecclesiastical principality of the Holy Roman Empire that existed from the end of the 9th to the early 19th century. It consisted of the temporal possessions of the prince-archbishop of Trier also prince-elector of the empire. There were only 2 other ecclesiastical prince-electors in the Empire: the Electorate of Cologne and the Electorate of Mainz, among which Mainz ranked first.
Paracelsus is said to have graduated in medicine in 1510, from the University of Vienna. He then went for a doctoral degree to the University of Ferrara in Italy, where he was free to express his rejection of the prevailing view that the stars and the planets controlled all the parts of the human body. Soon after taking his degree, he set out upon many years of wandering through almost every country in Europe, including England, Ireland, and Scotland. He took part in the Netherlandish Wars as an army surgeon. Later he went to Russia, was held captive by the Tartars, escaped into Lithuania, and went South into Hungary. In 1521 he again served as an army surgeon in Italy. His wanderings eventually took him to Egypt, Arabia, the Holy Land, and, finally, Constantinople. Everywhere he went, he sought out the most learned exponents of practical alchemy, not only to discover the most effective means of medical treatment but also to discover "the latent forces of Nature," and how to use them.
Paracelsus was a contemporary of Copernicus, Leonardo da Vinci, and Martin Luther. In 1524 Paracelsus returned to his home in Villach to find that his fame for many cures had preceded him. He was subsequently appointed town physician and lecturer in medicine at the University of basel in Switzerland, and students from all parts of Europe went to the city to hear his lectures. Pinning a program of his forthcoming lectures to the notice board of the university on June, 1527, he invited not only students but anyone and everyone. He was compared with Luther because his ideas were different from the mainstream and partly because of openly defiant acts against the existing authorities in medicine. Paracelsus rejected the comparison. Famously Paracelsus said, "I leave it to Luther to defend what he says and I will be responsible for what I say. That which you wish to Luther, you wish also to me: You wish us both in the fire."
Three weeks later, on June 24, 1527, Paracelsus reportedly burned the books of Avicenna, the Arab "Prince of Physicians," and those of the Greek physician Galen, in front of the university.
Paracelsus is credited as providing the 1st clinical/scientific mention of the unconscious. In his work he writes: "Thus, the cause of the cerebrovascular disease, 'chorea', as a consequence of a rheumatic fever, is a mere opinion and idea, assumed by imagination, affecting those who believe in such a thing. This opinion and idea are the origin of the disease both in children and adults. In children the case is also imagination, based not on thinking but on perceiving, because they have heard or seen something. The reason is this: their sight and hearing are so strong that unconsciously they have fantasies about what they have seen or heard."
Paracelsus called for the humane treatment of the mentally ill (but was ignored for several centuries) as he saw them not to be possessed by evil spirits, but merely 'brothers' ensnared in a treatable malady.
Carl Gustav Jung (26July1875-6June1961), the Swiss psychiatrist and psychotherapist, studied Paracelsus intensively. His work further drew from alchemical symbolism as a tool in psychotherapy. Following Paracelsus' path, it was Jung who first theorized that the symbolic language of alchemy was an expression of innate but unconscious psychological processes.
Paracelsus reached the peak of his career at basel. He gave birth to clinical diagnosis and the administration of highly specific medicines. This was uncommon for a period heavily exposed to cure-all remedies. The Germ Theory was anticipated by him as he proposed that diseases were 'entities in themselves', rather than states of being. In his lectures, he stressed the healing power of nature and denounced the use of methods of treating wounds that prevented natural draining.
This specific empirical knowledge originated from his personal experience as an army physician in the Venetian wars. Paracelsus demanded that the application of cow dung, feathers and other concoctions to wounds be surrendered in favor of keeping the wounds clean, stating, "if you prevent infection, Nature will heal the wound all by herself." During his time as a military surgeon, Paracelsus was exposed to the crudity of medical knowledge at the time, when doctors believed that infection was a natural part of the healing process. He advocated for cleanliness and protection of wounds, as well as the regulation of diet. Popular ideas of the time opposed these theories and suggested sewing or plastering wounds.
He also attacked many other medical malpractices of his time, including the use of worthless pills, salves, infusions, balsams, fumigants, and drenches.
By the spring of 1528, he fell into a disrepute with local doctors, apothecaries, and magistrates. He left Basel and stayed at various places with friends and continued to travel for the next 8 years. During this time, he revised old manuscripts and wrote new treatises. With the publication of "Great Surgery Book" in 1536 he restored and even extended the revered reputation he had earned at Basel. He became wealthy and was sought by royalty.
In May 1538, at the zenith of that 2nd period of renown, Paracelsus returned to Villach again to see his father, only to find that his father had died 4 years earlier. In 1541 Paracelsus himself died in mysterious circumstances at the White Horse Inn, Salz'Burg, where he had taken up an appointment under the prince-archbishop, Duke Ernst of Bavaria.
Historians of syphilitic disease, a sexually transmitted infection, credit Paracelsus with the recognition of the inherited character of syphilis. In his first short pamphlet of syphilis treatment that was also the most comprehensive clinical description the period ever produced, he wrote a clinical description of syphilis in which he maintained that it could be treated by carefully measured doses of mercury. Similarly, he was the first to discover that the disease could only by contracted by contact.
Hippocrates (460-370BC) put forward the theory that illness was caused by an imbalance of the 4 humors: blood, phlegm, black bile and yellow bile. These ideas were further developed by Galen (September 129 AD-200/216) into an extremely 'influential' and 'highly persistent' set of medical beliefs that were to last until the mid-1850s. In opposition to this idea, Paracelsus believed in 3 humors: salt (representing stability), sulfur (representing combustibility), and mercury (representing liquidity); he defined disease as a separation of one humor from the other two. He believed that body organs functioned alchemically, that is, they separated pure from impure. The dominant medical treatments in Paracelsus' time were specific diets to help in the "cleansing of the putrefied juices" combined with purging and bloodletting to restore the balance of the 4 humors. Paracelsus supplement and challenged this view with his beliefs that illnesses was the result of the body being attacked by outside agents. He objected to excessive bloodletting, saying that the process disturbed the harmony of the system, and the blood could not be purified by lessening its quantity.
One of his most overlooked achievements was the systematic study of minerals and the curative powers of alpine mineral springs. His countless wanderings also brought him deep into many areas of the Alps, where such therapies were already practiced on a less common scale than today.