Part 17

His lectures were such as had never been heard before at a university. He began his course by burning the works of Galen and Avicenna in a chafing dish, and denouncing the slavish reliance on authority which at that time characterised medical teaching and practice. He taught from his own experience, and he gave his lectures in German. Many quotations of his boastful utterance have been handed down to us, and they match well with what we know of him from his recognised writings. All the universities had less experience than he, and the very down on his neck was more learned than all the authors. He likened himself to Hippocrates, the one ancient whom he esteemed. He contrasted himself with the doctors in white gloves who feared to soil their fingers in the laboratory. “Follow me,” he cried; “not I you, Avicenna, Galen, Rhazes, Montagnana, Mesuë, and ye others. Ye of Paris, of Montpellier, of Swabia, of Cologne, of Vienna; from the banks of the Danube, of the Rhine, from the islands of the seas, from Italy, Dalmatia, Sarmatia, and Athens, Greeks, Arabs, Israelites. I shall be the monarch, and mine shall be the monarchy.”

In his capacity as city physician he naturally created many enemies among his fellow practitioners. His friends said he cured the cases which they found hopeless; they said he only gave temporary relief at the best, and that his remedies often killed the patients. He fell foul, too, of the apothecaries. He denounced their drugs and their ignorance. The three years he spent in Basel must have been lively both for him and his opponents.

“In the beginning,” he says, “I threw myself with fervent zeal on the teachers. But when I saw that nothing resulted from their practice but killing, laming, and distorting; that they deemed most complaints incurable; and that they administered scarcely anything but syrups, laxatives, purgatives, and oatmeal gruel, with everlasting clysters, I determined to abandon such a miserable art and seek truth elsewhere.” Again he says: “The apothecaries are my enemies because I will not empty their boxes. My recipes are simple and do not call for forty or fifty ingredients. I seek to cure the sick, not to enrich the apothecaries.”

His career at Basel was brought to a close by a dispute with a prebendary of the cathedral named Lichtenfels, whom he had treated. The canon, in pain, had promised him 200 florins if he would cure him. The cure was not disputed, but as Paracelsus had only given him a few little pills, the clergyman relied on the legal tariff. Paracelsus sued him, and the court awarded the legal fee, which was six florins. The doctor published his comments on the case, and it can readily be supposed that they were of such a character as to amount to contempt of court. He found it advisable to leave Basel hurriedly.

Between 1528 and 1535 he lived and practised at Colmar, Esslingen, Nuremberg, Noerdlingen, Munich, Regensburg, Amberg, Meran, St. Gall, and Zurich. From Switzerland he again set forth, and records of him are to be traced in Carinthia and Hungary. Lastly, the Prince Palatine, Duke Ernst of Bavaria, took him under his protection, and settled him at Salzburg. There a few months afterwards he died. From dissipation and exhaustion, say his enemies; by assassination, say his friends. A German surgeon who examined his skull when the body was exhumed thirty years after death, found in it a fracture of the temporal bone, which, he declared, could only have been produced during life, because the bones of a solid but desiccated skull could not have separated as was the case here. It was suggested that some hirelings of the local doctors whose prospects were endangered by this formidable invader had “accidentally” pushed him down some rocks, and that it was then that the fracture was caused. A monument to this great medical revolutionist is still to be seen by the chapel of St. Philip Neri, at Salzburg. It is a broken pyramid of white marble, with a cavity in which is his portrait, and a Latin inscription which commemorates his cures of diseases, and his generosity to the poor in the following terms:--

“Conditur hic Philippus Theophrastus, insignis Medicinæ Doctor, qui dira illa vulnera, lepram, podagram, hydroposim, aliaque insanabilia contagia mirificu arte sustulit; ac bona sua in pauperes distribuenda collocandaque honoravit. Anno 1541, die 24 Septembr. vitam cum morte mutavit.”

(“Here lies Philippus Theophrastus, the famous Doctor of Medicine, who by his wonderful art cured the worst wounds, leprosy, gout, dropsy, and other diseases deemed incurable and to his honour, shared his possessions with the poor.”)

Among the contemporaries of Paracelsus were Luther, Columbus, and Copernicus. Their names alone are sufficient to show how the long-suppressed energy of the human intellect was at that period bursting forth. These four men were perhaps the greatest emancipators of the human race from the chains of slavish obedience to authority in the past thousand years. Paracelsus was not, so far as is known, a Lutheran Protestant. But he could not help sympathising with his heroic countryman. “The enemies of Luther,” he wrote, “are to a great extent fanatics, knaves, bigots, and rogues. You call me a medical Luther, but you do not intend to honour me by giving me that name. The enemies of Luther are those whose kitchen prospects are interfered with by his reforms. I leave Luther to defend what he says, as I will defend what I say. That which you wish for Luther you wish for me; you wish us both to the fire.” There was, indeed, much in common between these two independent souls.

Columbus landed in the Western world the year before Paracelsus was born. Luther burnt the Pope’s Bull at Wittenberg in 1520, and it was this action of his which at the time at least thrilled the German nation more than any other event in the history of the Reformation. It is evident that Paracelsus, in imitating the conduct of his famous contemporary, was only demonstrating his conviction that scientific, no less than religious, thought needed to free itself from the shackles of tyrannic tradition.

HIS CHARACTER.

Such details of the personality of Paracelsus as have come down to us were written by his enemies. Erastus, a theologian as well as a physician, who may have met Paracelsus, and who fiercely attacked his system, depreciates him on hearsay. But Operinus, a disciple who had such reverence for him that when Paracelsus left Basel, he accompanied him and was with him night and day for two years, wrote a letter about him after his death to which it is impossible not to attach great importance.

In this letter Operinus expresses the most unbounded admiration of Paracelsus’s medical skill; of the certainty and promptitude of his cures; and especially of the “miracles” he performed in the treatment of malignant ulcers. But, adds Operinus, “I never discovered in him any piety or erudition.” He had never seen him pray. He was as contemptuous of Luther as he was of the Pope. Said no one had discovered the true meaning or got at the kernel of the Scriptures.

During the two years he lived with him, Operinus declares Paracelsus was almost constantly drunk. He was scarcely sober two hours at a time. He would go to taverns and challenge the peasantry to drink against him. When he had taken a quantity of wine, he would put his finger in his throat and vomit. Then he could start again. And yet Operinus also reports how perpetually he worked in his laboratory. The fire there was always burning, and something was being prepared, “some sublimate or arsenic, some safran of iron, or his marvellous opodeldoch.” Moreover, however drunk he might be he could always dictate, and Operinus says “his ideas were as clear and consecutive as those of the most sober could be.”

According to this same letter Paracelsus had been an abstainer until he was 25. He cared nothing for women. Operinus had never known him undress. He would lie down with his sword by his side, and in the night would sometimes spring up and slash at the walls and ceiling. When his clothes got too dirty he would take them off and give them to the first passer, and buy new ones. How he got his money Operinus did not know. At night he often had not an obolus; in the morning he would have a new purse filled with gold.

It is not easy to form a fair judgment of Paracelsus from this sketch. Many writers conclude that Operinus was spiteful because Paracelsus would not tell him his secrets. More likely Operinus left his master because his religious sentiments were shocked by him. Paracelsus was evidently a born mocker, and it may be that he took a malicious delight in making his disciple’s flesh creep. Operinus gives an instance of the levity with which his master treated serious subjects. He was sent for one day to see a poor person who was very ill. His first question was whether the patient had taken anything. “He has taken the holy sacrament,” was the reply. “Oh, very well,” said Paracelsus, “if he has another physician he has no need of me.” I think Operinus wrote in good faith, but the stories of the doctor’s drunkenness must have been exaggerated. It is inconceivable that he could have been so constantly drunk, and yet always at work. Operinus, it may be added, returned to Basel and set up as a printer, but failed and died in poverty.

Robert Browning’s dramatic poem of “Paracelsus” has been much praised by the admirers of the poet. It was written when Browning was 23, and represents in dramatic form the ambitious aspirations of a youth of genius who believes he has if mission in life; has intellectual confidence in his own powers; and the assurance that it is the Deity who calls him to the work.

In some time, His good time, I shall arrive; He guides me.

His bitter disappointment with his professorship at Basel, and his contempt for those who brought about his fall there, are depicted, and the effect which the realisation that his aims had proved impossible had on his habits and character is suggested; and at last, on his death-bed in a cell in the Hospital of St. Sebastian at Salzburg, he tells his faithful friend, Festus, who has all his life sought to restrain the ambitions which have possessed him--

You know the obstacles which taught me tricks So foreign to my nature, envy, hate, Blind opposition, brutal prejudice, Bald ignorance--what wonder if I sank To humour men the way they most approved.

“A study of intellectual egotism,” this poem has been called. Paracelsus was an egotist, without doubt. Indeed, egotism seems a ludicrously insignificant term to apply to his gorgeous self-appreciation. But it is, perhaps, a little difficult to recognise the wild untameable energy of this astonishing medical reformer in the prolix preacher represented in the poem.

Butler’s verse (in “Hudibras”) may be taken to represent the popular view held about Paracelsus after the first enthusiasm of his followers had cooled down

Bombastus kept a Devil’s bird, Shut in the pommel of his sword, That taught him all the cunning pranks Of past and future mountebanks.

German studies of Paracelsus have been very numerous during the past fifty years, and the general tendency has been greatly to enhance his fame.

After the death of Paracelsus, the Archbishop of Cologne desired to collect his works, many of which were in manuscript and scattered all over Germany. By this time there were many treatises attributed to him which he never wrote. It was a paying business to discover a new document by the famous doctor. It is believed that the fraudulent publications were far more numerous than the genuine ones, and it is quite possible that injustice has been done to his memory by the association with his name of some other peoples’ absurdities.

HIS MYSTICISM.

The mystic views of Paracelsus, or those attributed to him, are curious rather than useful. He seemed to have had as much capacity for belief as he had disbelief in other philosophers’ speculations. He believed in gnomes in the interior of the earth, undines in the seas, sylphs in the air, and salamanders in fire. These were the Elementals, beings composed of soul-substance, but not necessarily influencing our lives. The Elementals know only the mysteries of the particular element in which they live. There is life in all matter. Every mineral, vegetable, and animal has its astral body.

That of the minerals is called Stannar or Trughat; of the vegetable kingdom, Leffas; while the astral bodies of animals are their Evestra. The Evestrum may travel about apart from its body; it may live long after the death of the body. Ghosts are, in fact, the Evestra of the departed. If you commit suicide the Evestrum does not recognise the act; it goes on as if the body were going on also until its appointed time.

Man is a microcosm; the universe is the macrocosm. Not that they are comparable to each other; they are one in reality, divided only by form. If you are not spiritually enlightened you may not be able to perceive this. Each plant on earth has its star. There is a stella absinthii, a stella rorismarini. If we could compile a complete “herbarium spirituale sidereum” we should be fully equipped to treat disease. Star influences also form our soul-essences. This accounts for our varying temperaments and talents.

The material part of man, the living body, is the Mumia. This is managed by the Archæus, which rules over everybody; it is the vital principle. It provides the internal balsam which heals wounds or diseases, and controls the action of the various organs.

His theories of mercury, sulphur, and salt, as the constituents of all things, seem at first likely to lead to something conceivable if not credible. But before we grasp the idea we are switched off into the spiritual world again. It is the sidereal mercury, sulphur, and salt, spirit, soul, and body, to which he is alluding.

HIS CHEMICAL AND PHARMACEUTICAL INNOVATIONS.

These fantastic notions permeate all the medical treatises of Paracelsus. But every now and then there are indications of keen insight which go some way towards explaining his success as a physician; for it cannot be doubted that he did effect many remarkable cures. His European fame was not won by mere boasting. His treatise, _De Morbis ex Tartare oriundus_, is admittedly full of sound sense.

Some of his chemical observations are startling for their anticipations of later discoveries. If there were no air, he says, all living beings would die. There must be air for wood to burn. Tin, calcined, increases in weight; some air is fixed on the metal. When water and sulphuric acid attack a metal there is effervescence; that is due to the escape of some air from the water. He calls metals that have rusted, dead.

Saffron of Mars (the peroxide) is dead iron. Verdigris is dead copper. Red oxide of mercury is dead mercury. But, he adds, these dead metals can be revivified, “reduced to the metallic state,” are his exact words (and it is to be noted that he was the first chemist to employ the term “reduce” in this sense), by means of coal. Elsewhere he describes digestion as a solution of food; putrefaction as a transmutation. He knew how to separate gold from silver by nitric acid. It is quite certain that the writer of Paracelsus’s works was a singularly observant and intelligent chemist. He had “a wolfish hunger after knowledge,” says Browning.

“Have you heard,” wrote Gui Patin to a friend a hundred years after the death of the famous revolutionary, “that ‘Paracelsus’ is being printed at Geneva in four volumes in folio? What a shame that so wicked a book should find presses and printers which cannot be found for better things. I would rather see the Koran printed. It would not deceive so many people. Chemistry is the false money of our profession.”

HIS PHARMACY.

The composition of Paracelsus’s laudanum, the name of which he no doubt invented, has never been satisfactorily ascertained. Paracelsus himself made a great secret of it, and probably used the term for several medicines. It was generally, at least, a preparation of opium, sometimes opium itself. He is believed to have carried opium in the pommel of his sword, and this he called the “stone of immortality.”

Next to opium he believed in mercury, and was largely influential in popularising this metal and its preparations for the treatment of syphilis. It was principally employed externally before his time. He mocked at “the wooden doctors with their guaiacum decoctions,” and at the “waggon grease with which they smeared their patients.” He used turpith mineral (the yellow sulphate), and alembroth salt (ammonio-chloride), though he did not invent these names, and it is possible that he did not mean by them the same substances as the alchemists did. Operinus states that he always gave precipitated mercury (red precipitate, apparently) as a purgative. He gave it in pills with a little theriaca or cherry juice. This he also appears to have designated laudanum. It is certain that he gave other purgatives besides.

It must be admitted that if Basil Valentine is a mythical character, the reputation of Paracelsus is greatly enhanced. Nowhere does the latter claim to have been the first to introduce antimony into medical practice, but it is certain that it could not have been used to any great extent before his time. If we suppose that the works attributed to Basil Valentine were fictitious, so far, that is, as their authorship is concerned, they were compiled about fifty years after the death of Paracelsus, and at the time when his fame was at its zenith. Many of the allusions to antimony contained in those treatises might have been collected from the traditions of the master’s conversations and writings, much from his immediate disciples, and the whole skilfully blended by a literary artist.

Paracelsus praises highly his magistery of antimony, the essence, the arcanum, the virtue of antimony. Of this, he says, you will find no account in your books of medicine. This is how to prepare it. Take care at the outset that nothing corrupts the antimony; but keep it entire without any change of form. For under this form the arcanum lies concealed. No deadhead must remain, but it must be reduced by a third cohobation into a third nature. Then the arcanum is yielded. Dose, 4 grains taken with quintessence of melissa.

His “Lilium,” or tinctura metallorum, given as an alterative and for many complaints, was formulated in a very elaborate way by his disciples, but simplified it consisted of antimony, 4, tin 1, copper 1, melted together in a crucible, the alloy powdered, and combined (in the crucible) with nitre 6, and cream of tartar 6, added gradually. The mixture while still hot was transferred to a matrass containing strong alcohol 32, digested, and filtered.

Besides mercury and antimony, of which he made great use, iron, lead, copper, and arsenic were among the mineral medicines prescribed by him. He made an arseniate of potash by heating arsenic with saltpetre. He had great faith in vitriol, and the spirit which he extracted from it by distillation. This “spirit” he again distilled with alcohol and thereby produced an ethereal solution. His “specificum purgans” was afterwards said to be sulphate of potash. He recommended sublimed sulphur in inflammatory maladies, saffron of Mars in dysentery, and salts of tin against worms.

Whether his formulas were purposely obscure in so many cases, or whether mystery is due to the carelessness or ignorance of the copyists cannot be known. Much of his chemical and pharmaceutical advice is clear enough.

Honey he extols as a liquor rather divine than human, inasmuch as it falls from heaven upon the herbs. To get its quintessence you are to distil from it in a capacious retort a liquid, red like blood. This is distilled over and over again in a bain mariæ until you get a liquid of the colour of gold and of such pleasant odour that the like cannot be found in the world. This quintessence is itself good for many things, but from it the precious potable gold may be made. The juice of a lemon with this quintessence will dissolve leaf gold in warm ashes in forty-eight hours. With this Paracelsus says he has effected many wonderful cures which people thought he accomplished by enchantment. Elsewhere he speaks of an arcanum drawn from vitriol which is so excellent that he prefers it to that drawn from gold.

He refers with great respect to alchemy and the true alchemists, but with considerable shrewdness in regard to their professions of transmuting other metals into gold. He considered it remarkable that a man should be able to convert one substance into another in a few short days or weeks, while Nature requires years to bring about a similar result; but he will not deny the possibility. What he insists on, however, is that from metals and fire most valuable remedies can be obtained; and the apothecary who does not understand the right way of producing these is but a servant in the kitchen, and not a master cook.

Hellebore was an important medicine with Paracelsus. The white, he said, was suitable for persons under 50, the black for persons over 50. Physicians ought to understand that Nature provides different medicines for old and for young persons, for men and for women. The ancient physicians, although they did not know how to get the essence of the hellebore, had discovered its value for old persons. They found that people who took it after 50 became younger and more vigorous. Their method was to gather the hellebore when the moon was in one of the signs of conservation, to dry it in an east wind, to powder it and mix with it its own weight of sugar. The dose of this powder was as much as could be taken up with three fingers night and morning. The vaunted essence was simply a spirituous tincture. It was more effective if mistletoe, pellitory and peony seeds were combined with it. It was a great remedy for epilepsy, gout, palsy and dropsy. In the first it not merely purges out the humours, but drives away the epileptic body itself. The root must be gathered in the waning of the moon, when it is in the sign Libra, and on a Friday.

Paracelsus made balsam from herbs by digesting them in their own moisture until they putrefied, and then distilling the putrefied material. He obtained a number of essential oils and used them freely as quintessences. He defines quintessences thus:--Every substance is a compound of various elements, among which there is one which dominates the others, and impresses its own character on the compound. This dominating element, disengaged, is the quintessence. This term he obtained from Aristotle.

His oil of eggs was obtained by boiling the eggs very hard, then powdering them, and distilling until an oil rose to the surface. This he recommended against scalds and burns. Oil of aniseed he prescribed in colds to be put in the nostrils and applied to the temples on going to bed. Oil of tartar rectified in a sand-bath until it acquires a golden colour will cure ulcers and stone. Coral would quicken fancy, but drive away vain visions, spectres, and melancholy. Oil of a man’s excrements, twice distilled, is good to apply in fistulas, and also in baldness. Oil of a man’s skull which had never been buried got by distillation was given in 3 grain doses for epilepsy.