The teacher of Paracelsus, who exercised the greatest influence upon his mental development, was the celebrated Trithemius, the abbot of the Spanheim Benedictines (about 1500), who was so famous a student of chemistry and the occult philosophy that scholars and mighty nobles went on pilgrimages and princes sent ambassadors, to his monastery to gather some fragments of his vast learning. Amongst many works, he published several on magical subjects, and was the first who told the wondrous story of Dr. Faustus, in whose magical doings he was a devout believer.[829] His famous library consisted of the rare possession of two thousand volumes. Cornelius Agrippa was his pupil, and in a letter which he sent to his old master, with the manuscript of his Occult Philosophy, we find a passage which throws a light on the studies of the worthy abbot: “We conferred much about chemical matters, magic, cabalism, and other things which at the present time lie hidden as secret sciences and arts.”[830]
Theophrastus Bombastus Paracelsus of Hohenheim (1493-1541), “The Reformer of Medicine,” “Luther Alter,” effected a revolution in medicine, and is one of the most remarkable characters, not only in the history of the medical profession, but in that of civilization. There was so much in this great man’s conduct to admire, and so much of which to disapprove, that it is not surprising that he has been either wholly praised or entirely condemned, and by very few considered dispassionately. Perhaps Mr. Browning, in his noble poem Paracelsus, has given the world the truest conception of a man who did for his profession and for humanity the enormous service of liberating medicine from a slavish adhesion to authority, though it must be admitted that he was guilty of extravagances and excesses we may find it difficult to excuse, even though for the most part they were faults common to his country and his age. Paracelsus was born ten years later than Luther, at Einsiedeln, near Zurich. He studied under the abbot Trithemius of Spanheim, who was a great adept in magic, alchemy, and astrology. Under this teacher he acquired a taste for occult studies, and formed a determination to use them for the welfare of mankind. Trithemius was a theosophist. As was the custom of the times, Paracelsus became an itinerant student after his course at the University of Basel. He studied chemistry in the laboratory of the Fuggers at Schwatz, in the Tyrol.
Attached to the armies, he travelled widely as a military surgeon in the Netherlands, the Romagna, Naples, Venice, Denmark. He worked in the mines, that he might acquire a knowledge of metals, working as a common labourer for his bread. In Bohemian fashion he wandered over the world, visiting Spain, Portugal, Egypt, Tartary, and the East. He picked up his scientific knowledge by any means rather than from books. He said, “Reading never made a doctor, but practice is what forms a physician. For all reading is a footstool to practice, and a mere feather broom. He who meditates discovers something.” And so he held converse with the common folk, and talked and drank with boors, shepherds, Jews, gypsies, and tramps, gaining odd scraps of knowledge wherever he could. He had no books. His only volume was Nature, whom he interrogated at first-hand. He would rather learn medicine and surgery from an old country nurse than from an university lecturer. If there was one thing which he detested more than another, it was the principle of authority. He bent his head to no man.
In the year 1525 Paracelsus went to Basel, where he was fortunate in curing Froben, the great printer, by his laudanum, when he had the gout. Froben was the friend of Erasmus, who was associated with Œcolampadius, and soon after, upon the recommendation of Œcolampadius, he was appointed by the city magnates a professor of physics, medicine, and surgery, with a considerable salary; at the same time they made him city physician, to the duties of which office he requested might be added inspector of drug shops. This examination made the druggists his bitterest enemies, as he detected their fraudulent practices; they combined to set the other doctors of the city against him, and as these were exceedingly jealous of his skill and success, poor Paracelsus found himself in a hornet’s nest. We find him a professor at Basel University in 1526. He has become famous as a physician, the medicines which he has discovered he has successfully used in his practice; he was now in the eyes of his patients at least,
“The wondrous Paracelsus, life’s dispenser,
Fate’s commissary, idol of the schools and courts.”
He began his lectures at Basel by lighting some sulphur in a chafing dish, and burning the books of his great predecessors in the medical art, Avicenna, Galen, and others, saying: “Sic vos ardebitis in gehennâ.” He boasted that he had read no books for ten years, though he protested that his shoe-buckles were more learned than the authors whose works he had burned.
It must have been a wonderful spectacle when this new teacher took his place before his pupils. The benches occupied hitherto by a dozen or two of students were crowded with an eager audience anxious for the new learning. Literature had been exhumed many years before, and now it was the turn of Science! Leaving the morbid seclusion of the cloisters, men had given up dreaming for inquiry, and baseless visions for the acquisition of facts. This was the childhood of our science, and its days were bright with the poetry of youth. It is a sight to arouse our enthusiasm to see in the early dawn of our modern science this man standing up alone to pit himself against the whole scientific authority of his day. He rises from the crucibles and fires where his predecessors had been vainly seeking for gold and silver, ever and again pretending to have found them, and always going empty-handed to a deluded world. Henceforth, he says, his alchemy shall serve a nobler purpose than gold seeking; it shall aid in the healing of disease. He casts aside the sacred books of medicine which have been handed down the ages by his predecessors; destroying them, he declares, with an earnestness which is less tinged by arrogance than by conviction, that these men had been blind guides, that he alone has the clue of the maze, and he forsakes all to follow Truth, though she lead him to death. In his generous impulse to serve mankind he has spoken harshly of his opponents. They would not have helped him, any way. He was above them; they could not understand him, so they hated him, and he scorned them. As too often happens to such heroes, he forgot the love of his neighbour in his love for mankind.
Paracelsus found his pupils holding fast by the teachings of the school of Salerno, and there seems no ground for supposing that the healing art had made the slightest progress in Europe from the foundation of that school in 1150, except perhaps in pharmacy. On the day that Paracelsus stood up before his audience at Basel University, he cried, “Away with Ætius, Oribasius, Galen, Rhasis, Serapion, Avicenna, Averroes, and the other blocks!” He had diplomas sent him from Germany, France, and Italy, and a letter from Erasmus.
In 1528 we find him at Colmar, in Alsatia. He has been driven by priests and doctors from Basel.