Paracelsus death

Schweisheimer, W. Paracelsus - father of modem pharmacy four hundredth anniversary of his death. MedRecord 154 (1941) 35-36. 

The alchemical mage, Paracelsus, had a magic sword. People believed that its pommel-jewel was actually the Philosophers Stone— since it had the word Azoth upon it. After Paracelsus apparent death, his tomb was opened to aquire his enchanted sword. But the tomb was empty of both sword and of any physical remains of the alchemist. 

It wasn t just the poor and ignorant who believed the tales about Paracelsus. The scholarly English poet and cleric John Donne accused Paracelsus of serving the Devil. In time the stories about him became intertwined with those about the legendary Dr. Faustus. And when Goethe wrote Faust two and a half centuries after Paracelsus s death, he incorporated several allusions to the magician s life and writings. 

Paracelsus attacked the established medical community of his time. His criticism was harsh, and he alienated many of his established fellow physicians with his bombastic writings. Yet, many of his practices were sound, and more importantly, those physicians who did ascribe to his practices achieved better results than when using traditional methods. Paracelsus works were not published and distributed widely until some twenty years after his death. By the end of the sixteenth century, Paracelsus methods had attracted a number of followers, and his methods formed the new basis of standard medical practice. Paracelsus followers became known as the iatrochem-ical physicians. They used a variety of drugs and treatments that depended on specific dosages of medicine prepared with specific purity. His ideas on chemical purity and for-... 

Slack, Mirrors of FFealth . Cf Colin Jones, Plague and its Metaphors Brockliss and Jones, Medical World, 38-42, 67-71. From the Black Death of the mid-i4th cent, until 1500, 281 extant plague tracts were written Campbell, Black Death, Pagel, Paracelsus, 172—87 Nancy Siraisi, Medieval and Early Renaissance Medicine An Introduction to Knowledge and Practice 1990), 128,189. 

Does this mean that we are drugging ourselves to death, as there are thousands of formulations available in the market, some rational and most irrational. There is no single drug that is available as safe, and according to Paracelsus, safe drug never was and never will be. Drug discovery has tried various approaches to find an NCE, for example ... 

This was the world into which Paracelsus was born three years after the death of Trevisan. His father was William Bombast von Hohenheim, a celebrated physician of the little village of Einsiedeln in the Swiss canton of Schwyz. For a while it seemed the child could not survive the weakness of its body. Small, frail and rickety, only the constant care of his mother, in charge of the village hospital, carried him through the dangerous period of infancy. 

The so-called Christ of Medicine , a major medical reformer and iconoclast, whose many enemies put it about that his death in 1541 was due to a drunken orgy (he may have in fact either been assassinated or died of rickets). The word bombastic derives from Paracelsus it was his nature, as well as being one of his middle names. A huge school sprang up after his death (see below). For more on his work, see Chapter 2. 

Paracelsus s influence grew vastly after his death, and his followers exerted a profound influence on European medicine in the remaining years of the sixteenth century and well into the seventeenth. Among his most prominent followers were Adam von Bodenstein (1528-1577), who edited many of the great man s works and published them at Basle, Gerard Dorn (fl. 1560s-... 

Paracelsus, the author of the first monograph on occupational diseases, published in 1567 after his death, described in detail the effects of chronic mercury poisoning, distinguishing between the acute and the chronic effects. As a physician, he also devised a use for mercury to treat syphilis, which was used for more than 300 years. 

Paracelsus seems to have believed in the four Aristotelian elements, but he rejected almost everything else of the ancient system. Instead, he promoted the concept of the three principles, namely sulfur, mercury, and salt. These three principles were not exactly the materials they were named after, since they really represented concepts sulfur was combustion and represented the soul, mercury was fluidity and represented the spirit, and salt was inertness and represented the body. By their combination and balance, they could explain the behavior of the world and, in particular, the body. Paracelsus wrote extensively, but most of his work was not published until after his death. His writing style was complex and often convoluted, full of obscure references, metaphors, and religious symbolism. For example, when describing the relation of sulfur, mercury, and salt, he said, The Sulphur resolves itself by the spirit of Salt in the liquor of Mercury, which of itself is a liquid distributed from heaven to earth, and is the albumen of the heaven, and the mid space. 6 It would not be clear to a non-Paracelsian what this description meant. 

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