He had been called to the bedside of some rich cleric who was ill. He cured him, but so speedily that his fee was refused. Though not at all a mercenary man (for he always gave the poor his services gratuitously), he sued the priest; but the judge refused to interfere, and Paracelsus used strong language to him, and had to fly to escape punishment. We must not be too hard upon the canon. Disease was treated with profound respect in those days, and great patients liked to be cured with deliberation and some ceremonial.
The closing scenes of the life of Paracelsus were passed in a cell in the hospital of Salzburg, in the year 1541, when he died at the age of forty-eight, a martyr of science. Recent investigations in contemporary records have proved that he had been attacked by the servants of certain physicians who were his jealous enemies, and that in consequence of a fall he sustained a fracture of the skull, which proved fatal in a few days.
Within a period of time covering fifteen years he had written some 106 treatises on medicine, alchemy, natural history and philosophy, magic, and other subjects. He despised University learning. “The book of Nature,” he declared, “was that which the physician should read, and to do so he must walk over its leaves.” His library consisted of a Bible, St. Jerome on the Gospels, a volume on medicine, and seven manuscripts. His epitaph tells but a part of his honours. “Here lies Philippus Paracelsus, the famous doctor of medicine, who, by his wonderful art, cured bad wounds, lepra, gout, dropsy, and other incurable diseases, and to his own honour divided his possessions among the poor.”
This but feebly expresses what medicine owes to him. He discovered the metal zinc, and hydrogen gas. In place of the elaborate concoctions and filthy messes which were given as medicines in his time, he taught doctors to give tinctures and quintessences of drugs. He invented laudanum, and anticipated our discovery of transfusion of blood. He opposed the barbarous method of reducing dislocations and dealing with fractures, introduced the use of mercury in the treatment of syphilis, and came very near to the discoveries which go under the name of Darwinism. He taught that chemistry was to be employed, not in making gold, but for the preparation of medicines; and he introduced into practice mineral remedies, including mineral baths, iron, sulphur, antimony, arsenic, gold, tin, lead, etc. Amongst the vegetable remedies employed by him was arnica.
Paracelsus used chemical principles, says Sprengel, for the explanation of particular diseases. “Most or all diseases, according to him, arise from the effervescence of salts, from the combustion of sulphur, or from the coagulation of mercury.”[831]
His ætiology attributed diseases to five causes:—1. The Ens astrale (a certain power of the stars); this means no more than foul air. 2. The Ens veneni (power of poison), arising from errors of assimilation and digestion. 3. The Ens naturale (power of nature or of the body); diatheses. 4. Ens spirituale (power of the spirit); the disorders which arise from perverted ideas. 5. Ens Dei (power of God); the injuries or causes of disease predetermined by God.[832]
When Paracelsus came upon the scene of medical history, alchemy had just begun to lose its credit. The true students of science had discovered its deceptions and had abandoned it to the quacks. It has often happened, and happens still, that certain pretended sciences, when cast aside as worthless, are taken from their hiding-places and made to do duty in another and perhaps nobler form. Paracelsus set himself the task of rehabilitating alchemy. The deeper thinkers, the more ardent truth-seekers in religion and science, imbued with philosophy and penetrated by the scholasticism of the age, were quite ready for a new reign of theosophical medicine to take the place of the Arabian polypharmacy.
George Agricola (1494-1555) was a physician who practised in Bohemia, and was the first to raise mineralogy to the dignity of a science. He did so much for it, in fact, that no great advance was made in it from the point at which he left it, till the eighteenth century.
Conrad Gesner (1516-1565), surnamed the German Pliny, was a famous naturalist of vast erudition, and imbued with an enthusiastic love of science. In 1541 he was professor of physics and natural history at Zurich. He wrote several books on ancient medicine and botany. To prepare himself to write his History of Animals, he read 250 authors, travelled nearly all over Europe, and gathered information from every source, even from hunters and shepherds. His medical works show that he was far above the absurd fancies and prejudices of his time.
Andreas Cæsalpinus (1519-1603), the first systematical botanist, and the founder of the work which Linnæus developed, studied, if he did not also teach, anatomy and medicine at Pisa. He had a clear idea of the circulation of the blood, at least through the lungs, and he was the first to use the term “circulation.” Claims have been made on his behalf as the discoverer of the circulation; but they cannot be substantiated, as he did not know of the direct flow of the blood from the arteries to the veins.