CHAPTER V
Iatro-Chemistry
The term “iatro-chemistry” denotes a particular phase in the history of medicine and of chemistry. The iatro-chemists were a school of physicians who sought to apply chemical principles to the elucidation of vital phenomena. According to them, human illnesses result from abnormal chemical processes within the body, and these could only be counteracted by appropriate chemical remedies. Although this idea did not originate with him, the chief exponent of this school is commonly said to be Paracelsus.
A man of violent passions, coarse, drunken, arrogant, and unscrupulous, Philippus Aureolus Theophrastus Paracelsus Bombastus von Hohenheim—to give him his full name—would seem to have possessed none of the attributes needed by the successful leader of an intellectual revolution.
Born at Etzel in Switzerland in 1493, son of a physician, William Bombast von Hohenheim, who combined the practice of astrology with that of alchemy, Paracelsus, even as a youth, became a wanderer, passing from province to province and cloister to cloister, living by telling fortunes and practising sometimes as a quack and at other times as an army surgeon, and gaining, as he tells us, much curious information from old women, gipsies, conjurers, and chemists. If we may trust his own account of himself, he had, before he was thirty-three, wandered over the whole of Europe, and even into Africa and Asia, everywhere performing miraculous cures and constantly getting into trouble. In 1526 he secured the appointment of Professor of Physic in the University of Basle, and signalised his occupancy of the chair by a course of lectures—a farrago of confused German and barbarous Latin—in which he assailed with extraordinary vigour and unexampled coarseness the medical system of the school of Galen. Scandalised as his professional brethren might be, Paracelsus expressed, intentionally or unintentionally, the feeling of impatience with which the laity viewed a system of therapeutics based only on tradition. In this revolt against authority he initiated a movement which, whatever might have been its influence on medicine, served eventually, under the guidance of worthier men, to emancipate chemistry from the thraldom of alchemy.
Paracelsus did little more than initiate. Although his many tracts show that he was familiar with nearly every chemical preparation of his time, many of which he used in his practice, he added no new substance to science. A man of great ability and extraordinary talent, he squandered his powers in dissipation. His intemperate conduct soon lost him his chair at Basle; and, after an ignoble quarrel with the magistracy, he fled the town, and, resuming his wandering life, died, under wretched circumstances, at Salzburg, in his forty-eighth year.
Space will not permit of any account of the philosophical opinions of Paracelsus—of his mysticism, his theosophy, his pantheism, his extraordinary doctrine of the Archæus and Tartarus, his association of astrology with medicine. His chief merit lies in his insistence that the true function of chemistry was not to make gold artificially, but to prepare medicines and substances useful to the arts. He thereby made chemistry indispensable to medicine, and thenceforward chemistry began to be taught in the universities and in the schools as an essential part of a medical education.
Paracelsus is usually regarded as a typical alchemist—the kind of man made familiar to us by the paintings of Teniers, Van Ostade, and Stein—a boorish, maudlin knave, who divided his time between the pothouse and the kitchen in which he prepared his extracts, simples, tinctures, and the other nostrums which he palmed off upon a credulous world, as ignorant and superstitious as himself. There is much in the personal history of Paracelsus that serves to justify such a view of him. That he was in the main an impudent charlatan, ignorant, vain, and pretentious, there can be little doubt. He had an astonishing audacity and a boundless effrontery; and it was largely by the exercise of these qualities that he secured such professional success as he enjoyed.
To judge from the number of the published works associated with his name, he was an active and industrious writer. Considering that during the greater part of his waking time he was more or less intoxicated, it is difficult to conceive what opportunity he had for composing them. Only one or two are known to be genuine. These, according to Operinus, his publisher, he dictated; and from their incoherence and obscurity, their mystical jargon, and misuse of terms, they read like the ravings of one whom drunkenness had deprived of reason. Many of the tracts and larger works appeared after his death—some of them years after; and there is no certain proof that he was the actual author. Even if we regard them as suppositious, the fact that they should be published under his name is significant of the influence and notoriety which this extraordinary man succeeded in achieving during his short and chequered career.
The immediate followers of Paracelsus—among whom may be named Thurneysser, Dorn, Severinus, Duchesne—distinguished themselves only by the boldness with which they promulgated his doctrines, and the unscrupulous use which they made of his methods. They were all zealous anti-Galenists, who professed to believe that the sum and perfection of human knowledge was to be found in the Cabala, and that the secrets of magical medicine were contained in the Apocalypse. They adopted pantheism in all its grossness: everything that exists eats, drinks, and voids excrement; even minerals and liquids assimilate food, and eliminate what they do not incorporate. Sylphs inhabit the air, nymphs the water, pigmies the earth, and salamanders the fire. Thus even the Aristotelian elements were animated. Mercury, sulphur, and salt were, according to Paracelsus, the primal principles which entered into the composition of all things, material and immaterial, visible and invisible. The following so-called “harmonies” were essential articles of faith with a Paracelsian:—