Paracelsus burned the medical classics in a Basel market square
On 23 June 1527 the new city physician of Basel set fire to a copy of Avicenna's Canon of Medicine, the enormous textbook every university doctor revered. Theophrastus von Hohenheim, better known as Paracelsus, lectured in German rather than Latin and brought barber-surgeons and alchemists into class to prove that practice beat titles.
He was born on 10 November 1493 in Einsiedeln, in the Swiss canton of Schwyz, in a house beside a bridge over the Sihl. His father Wilhelm, a physician descended illegitimately from a Swabian noble, taught him botany, mining and medicine; his mother had run the local abbey's hospital. After her death around 1502 the family moved to Villach in Carinthia. He studied at Basel and Vienna and took a doctorate at Ferrara around 1515.
Convinced that real knowledge lay outside books, he spent 1517 to 1524 roaming Europe, possibly as far as Egypt, and served as an army surgeon. A stint in Salzburg ended when he fled arrest over the Peasants' Revolt. Called to Basel in 1526 to treat the printer Johann Frobenius, he reportedly cured him and began trading letters with Erasmus. The Basel post followed, but his insults toward local doctors and apothecaries made enemies, and facing a lawsuit he could not win, he left in February 1528. A companion described him as rarely sober.
His pen name first surfaced in Nuremberg in 1529 on an astrological pamphlet. It may Latinise Hohenheim or boast of surpassing the Roman writer Celsus, and friends in Colmar may have coined it. He denounced the fashionable guaiac-wood cure for syphilis as a racket benefiting the Fugger bankers who imported it, and the Leipzig medical faculty blocked his fuller treatise on the disease. Wandering on, he preached among Appenzell peasants and studied the ailments of Tyrolean miners.
Only in 1536 did a major medical book, the Great Surgery Book, reach print. He practised astrology, designed healing talismans, and wrote works of divination that later made him a prophet to the Rosicrucians. He died in Salzburg on 24 September 1541. Later editors published much of what he had left unprinted, forgers added more, and by 1618 a London pharmacopoeia included Paracelsian remedies. He is often called the father of toxicology.
Source: Paracelsus
