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.