After the Peasants' War
When the peasant revolt was crushed, Paracelsus too fell into captivity; once it was clearly shown that he had never taken up arms, he was spared the scaffold, but he was banished from Salzburg and left it in haste. In 1527 he was working at Strasbourg as a surgeon and lecturing to barber-surgeons. The principles of his theory were a mixture of rational statements and nonsense, of medicine and magic, though God knows how the future will judge our own certainties. He rejected astrology and then accepted it, so that he thought it unlawful to prescribe an enema to his patients under unfavorable positions of the moon relative to the earth. He mocked trust in the divining rod for finding underground sources, yet claimed to have turned metals into gold. Like the young Agrippa he went wandering in thirst for knowledge, eagerly seeking the "philosopher's stone," a universal principle that would reveal the secret of creation.
A Medley of Superstition and Chemistry
His belief in spirits, fire-eating salamanders and the method of "cure by likeness," treating a diseased organ with substances like it in color or shape, is evident in his writings. He did not shrink from using magic formulas and amulets to heal patients, perhaps valuing their effect by suggestion. Yet this same man, thoroughly steeped in the delusions of his time, boldly put chemistry into the service of medicine. Sometimes Paracelsus spoke like a philosopher of matter: "Man is separated from matter, and matter is the whole of creation." Man stands to the universe as the small world to the great, and both are composed of the same kinds of elements, founded on salts, sulfur and mercury; and metals, minerals that seem lifeless, have a life within them. Chemical therapy is in truth the use of the great world to heal the small one. Man's body is a compound of chemical substances, and disease is a disturbance in the chemicals that make up the body, not in Galen's "humors"; and on this idea the modern theory of metabolism was founded. At that time healing drugs generally came from the world of plants and animals, that is, from organic matter; Paracelsus, deeply absorbed in alchemy, insisted on the healing properties of inorganic substances. He admitted mercury, lead, sulfur, iron, arsenic, copper sulfate and potassium sulfate into the pharmacopoeia and popularized chemical extracts and tinctures.
Paracelsus was the first to prepare the "tincture of opium" now called laudanum. He also prescribed bathing in mineral waters and described their varied properties and effects. He pointed to the influence of geography and occupation in causing disease, studied the lung disease of miners, and linked stunted bodily growth in children to endemic goiter. He also contributed much to the understanding of epilepsy, and traced paralysis of limbs and speech disorders to injuries and blows. Although general opinion held gout and swollen joints to be the natural, incurable results of age, Paracelsus claimed they arose from acids formed by the long retention of waste in the colon, and so on his diagnosis were curable. "The root cause of nearly all diseases," he said, "is to be found in the clotting of undigested matter in the intestines." He named the acids formed by the corruption of material in the bowels "tartar," because their deposits on joints, muscles, kidneys and bladder, in his words, "burn like hell, and Tartarus is the name of hell." "Doctors boast of anatomy," he said, "but cannot see the tartar sticking to their own teeth"; and the term caught on and became common. His suggested method was to prevent such deposits by a nourishing, healthful diet and complete elimination of waste. He tried to "soften" the deposits with compounds of bay-leaf oil and resin, and in severe cases prescribed surgery to expel or remove the harmful deposits. He claimed to have cured several gout patients this way, and some physicians of our own day believe they have had successes in this field by following his diagnosis.
Cures at Basel and a Professorship
News of Paracelsus's successful cures at Strasbourg reached Basel. There the famous publisher Froben suffered severe pain in his right leg, and his physicians had advised amputation. Froben invited Paracelsus to Basel to diagnose him. Paracelsus came to his bedside and treated him without using the surgeon's knife. Erasmus, who then lived with Froben and with many bodily pains of his own, asked Paracelsus's help; Paracelsus wrote him a prescription, though it is unknown how helpful it proved. In any case these famous patients added to the young doctor's fame, and later a series of strange events brought him close to a university chair, his old ambition. At this time the Protestants held a majority on the Basel town council. Despite the protests of Erasmus and the Catholic minority, they dismissed Dr. Wonecker, the town physician, on the charge of "having said new things against the Reformation," and put Paracelsus in his place. The council and Paracelsus had agreed that this appointment qualified him to teach at the university, but the medical faculty objected, and, knowing Paracelsus's weakness in anatomy, proposed a public examination of his fitness. Paracelsus evaded it, took up his official medical post, and without university approval gave public lectures in a private hall (1527).
The Manifesto
He gathered pupils with an unparalleled announcement. In it Theophrastus Bombast von Hohenheim, doctor of both medicine and surgery and professor, offers his greetings to students of medicine. Among all professions, medicine alone is recognized as a sacred art, yet today few doctors are found who succeed in their work. So the time has come to restore medicine to its former high rank, cleanse it of the pollution of barbarians' hands, and correct their errors. In doing so he will be bound by none of the precepts of his predecessors, but will study nature alone and use the experience gained over many years. Who does not know that most doctors today fail because they still follow Avicenna, Galen and Hippocrates like slaves? Such teachings may bring brilliant titles but do not make a real doctor. What a true doctor needs is not eloquence and knowledge of languages and books, but deep acquaintance with nature and its effects. Grateful for the generous endowment the worthy men of Basel have made for this purpose, he will spend two hours each day interpreting the textbooks he has written on surgery and pathology, to make the foundations of his methods plain to the public. He did not take these things from Hippocrates and Galen, but created them anew through unceasing labor and on the basis of experience, "the supreme teacher of all things." When he wishes to prove a point he does not rest his word on the sayings of great authorities but makes experience the foundation and builds his own reasoning on it. "So, dear reader, if you feel in your heart an urge to penetrate those divine secrets, and want in a short time to reach the depths of medicine, come to Basel to see me." Basel, June 1527.
The Bonfire of St. John's Eve
Thirty students enrolled. On opening day Paracelsus appeared in the professor's gown, as custom required, but at once threw it aside and stood before his students in the coarse clothes and smoke-stained leather apron of an alchemist. His lectures on medicine were in Latin, written down beforehand by his secretary Oporinus (who later printed Vesalius's On the Fabric of the Human Body), but in the surgery class he spoke German. All this seemed unseemly to physicians who followed custom; yet more striking still was Paracelsus's formal proposal: "No apothecary should conspire with any doctor." To show his contempt for traditional medicine he lit a fire with his students on the pretext of the feast of St. John (24 June 1527) and gleefully burned in it a newly published medical book, probably the Introduction of Jacobus (the source's identification is tentative). He wrote: "I threw the Introduction into the fire of St. John so that all misfortunes might rise with its smoke into the air. In this way the realm of medicine is purified of its pollution." People compared Paracelsus with Luther, who had thrown a papal bull to the flames. His life in Basel was as contrary to custom as his lectures.
Oporinus writes: "During the two years I lived in his company, I saw him day and night drinking and gorging ... He was very free with money, so that sometimes not a penny was left to him ... Every month he bought a new cloak and gave the old one to the first person at the door, but his cloaks were usually so dirty that I never wished to take one." Heinrich Bullinger likewise called Paracelsus immoderately given to wine and "a most slovenly and filthy man." Yet Oporinus also testified to his master's admirable cures: "he worked nearly miracles in treating all kinds of ulcers, when other physicians had pronounced those cases incurable."