Boasts and a Lampoon
To make up for the lack of a diploma, he gave himself titles such as "monarch of philosophy and medicine," "doctor of both medicine and surgery" and "promoter of philosophy," and salved the wounds to his inner pride by stressing his bold claims: "All must follow me, and the monarchy of medicine will be mine ... All the universities and all the old writers together have less talent than the back of my neck" (the source's sentence is partly damaged). Paracelsus, driven from everywhere, made this saying his motto: "He who can belong to himself must not belong to another." History, to rebuke him for his boasting, turned his family name, Bombast, into a word of reproach.
Whether through collusion with the university faculty or through the natural rebellion of young students against a self-willed teacher, a nameless wit among Basel's youth composed and circulated a satire in clumsy Latin: a letter purporting to come from Galen himself, written from hell to his challenger, whom it calls Cacophrastus ("bad-sayer," a pun on Theophrastus). In this lampoon Galen mocks Paracelsus's mystical coinages, calls him mad, and advises him in friendly fashion to be done with his posturing.
Flight from Basel
Unable to find the author, Paracelsus appealed to the town council to question the students one by one and punish the guilty. The council ignored his request. About the same time one of the canons of Basel cathedral offered a hundred gold pieces as a reward for curing his illness. Paracelsus cured him in three days; the high churchman gave him six gold pieces and refused to pay the rest, arguing that the treatment had been too short. Paracelsus took him to court and lost the case, and with it his composure. In anger he called his opponents frauds and flatterers and published an anonymous pamphlet accusing clergy and judges of corruption. The council ordered his arrest but put off carrying it out until the next morning, and Paracelsus fled by night (1528). He had spent ten months in Basel.
Nuremberg and the Treatise on Syphilis
At Nuremberg he repeated the experience of his Basel life. The city fathers entrusted him with the prison hospital, where he achieved remarkable cures; but the envy of the town's physicians soon made itself heard, and he denounced them for dishonesty and love of money. Seeing that most council members were Protestants, he took up the defense of Catholicism.
The Fugger family, which held the monopoly on guaiacum wood, was alarmed to learn that Paracelsus considered that "holy wood" useless against syphilis. In 1530 Paracelsus induced an obscure publisher to print his Three Books on the French Disease. The book was so insulting to doctors that a storm of protest arose and forced Paracelsus to resume his wandering. He planned a fuller book on the same subject, but the town council refused permission to print it. In a letter to the council he pleaded, with ineffective eloquence and in the name of freedom of the press; but in any case that book never saw print in his lifetime. In fact this work contained the best clinical account of syphilis written up to that time and, for treatment, prescribed the internal use of definite doses of mercury, which he held more effective than external ointment. Syphilis became a battlefield on which herbal remedies fought chemical ones.
Years of Wandering
After moving to St. Gallen, Paracelsus spent six months in the house of one of his patients. There and later he spent his time writing works such as The Wonderful Work, On the Byways and the Great Surgery (the titles are as the source gives them) in unpolished German. They are masses of raw ore in which grains of diamond and jewels are found here and there. In 1534 he turned once more to magic and composed the Philosophy of Legends (the source's title; apparently a summary of the occult sciences).
With the death of his patient at St. Gallen he again became a fugitive without a home and drifted from city to city in Germany, at times reduced to begging for a crust of bread. In youth he had uttered blasphemies: baptism has only a symbolic meaning; the sacraments are good for children and the mad but useless for thoughtful people; and praying to saints is a waste of time. But now (1532, as the source gives it), disillusioned and penniless, Paracelsus felt in his heart a "return to religion"; he fasted, gave away whatever he had of worldly goods to the poor, wrote essays on religious faith, and consoled his troubled mind with hope of heaven. In 1540 the bishop of Salzburg sheltered him in an almshouse; and the man who fifteen years earlier had fanned the fire of revolution in that same city now gratefully accepted the kindness. In the will he left, he gave his few remaining coins to relatives and his medical instruments to the town's barbers, and on 24 September 1541 he committed his body to the earth.
A Judgment
He was a man bowed under the weight of his own genius. His being was full of varied experience and shrewd insight, but he was too little schooled to separate science from magic, too disorderly to restrain the fire of his temper, and too rebellious and angry to cultivate his influence in the crucible of time. His biography, together with Agrippa's story, probably had a direct effect in enriching the legend of Faust. Until a hundred years ago, people in Austria who fell ill with one of the endemic diseases would go on pilgrimage to Paracelsus's tomb at Salzburg, seeking cure from the magic of his spirit or his bones.