The lectures which he delivered on Practical Medicine still remain, written in a confused mixture of German and barbarous Latin, and containing little or nothing except a farrago of empirical remedies, advanced with the greatest confidence. They have a much greater resemblance to a collection of quack advertisements than to the sober lectures of a professor in a university. In the month of November, 1526, he wrote to Christopher Clauser, a physician in Zurich, that as Hippocrates was the first physician among the Greeks, Avicenna among the Arabians, Galen among the Pergamenians, and Marsilius among the Italians, so he was beyond dispute the greatest physician among the Germans. Every country produces an illustrious physician, whose medicines are adapted to the climate in which he lived, but not suited to other countries. The remedies of Hippocrates were good to the Greeks, but not suitable to the Germans; thus it was necessary that an inspired physician should spring up in every country, and that he was the person destined to teach the Germans the art of curing all diseases.[145]
Paracelsus began his professorial career by burning publicly, in his class-room, and in the presence of his pupils, the works of Galen and Avicenna, assuring his hearers that the strings of his shoes possessed more knowledge than those two celebrated physicians. All the universities united had not, he assured them, as much knowledge as was contained in his own beard, and the hairs upon his neck were better informed than all the writers that ever existed put together. To give the reader an idea of the arrogant absurdity of his pretensions, I shall translate a few sentences of the preface to his tract, entitled “Paragranum,” where he indulges in his usual strain of rodomontade: “Me, me you shall follow, you Avicenna, you Galen, you Rhazes, you Montagnana, you Mesue. I shall not follow you, but you shall follow me. You, I say, you inhabitants of Paris, you inhabitants of Montpelier, you Suevi, you Misnians, you inhabitants of Cologne, you inhabitants of Vienna; all you whom the Rhine and the Danube nourish, you who inhabit the islands of the sea; you also Italy, you Dalmatia, you Athens, you Greek, you Arabian, you Israelite—I shall not follow you, but you shall follow me. Nor shall any one lurk in the darkest and most remote corner whom the dogs shall not piss upon. I shall be the monarch, the monarchy shall be mine. If I administer, and I bind up your loins, is he with whom you are at present delighted a Cacophrastus? This ordure must be eaten by you.”
“What will your opinion be when you see your Cacophrastus constituted the chief of the monarchy? What will you think when you see the sect of Theophrastus leading on a solemn triumph, if I make you pass under the yoke of my philosophy? your Pliny will you call Cacopliny, and your Aristotle, Cacoaristotle? If I plunge them together with your Porphyry, Albertus, &c., and the whole of their compatriots into my necessary.” But the terms become now so coarse and indelicate, that I cannot bring myself to proceed further with the translation. Enough has been given to show the extreme arrogance and folly of Paracelsus.
So far, however, was this impudence and grossness from injuring the interest of Paracelsus, that we are assured by Ramus and Urstisius that it contributed still further to increase it. The coarseness of his language was well suited to the vulgarity of the age; and his arrogance and boasting were considered, as usual, as a proof of superior merit. The cure which he performed on Frobenius, drew the attention of Erasmus himself, who consulted him about the diseases with which he was afflicted; and the letters that passed between them are still preserved. The epistle of Paracelsus is short, enigmatical, and unintelligible; that of Erasmus is distinguished by that clearness and elegance which characterize his writings.[146] But Frobenius died in the month of October, 1527, and the antagonists of Paracelsus attributed his death (and probably with justice) to the violent remedies which had been administered to a man whose constitution had been destroyed by the gout.
His death contributed not a little to tarnish the glory of Paracelsus: but he suffered the greatest injury from the habits of intoxication in which he indulged, and from the vulgarity of the way in which he spent his time. He hardly ever went into his class-room to deliver a lecture till he was half intoxicated, and scarcely ever dictated to his secretaries till he had lost the use of his reason by a too liberal indulgence in wine. If he was summoned to visit a patient, he scarcely ever went but in a state of intoxication. Not unfrequently he passed the whole night in the alehouse, in the company of peasants, and when morning came, was quite incapable of performing the duties of his station. On one occasion, after a debauch, which lasted the whole night, he was called next morning to visit a patient; on entering the room, he inquired if the sick person had taken any thing: “Nothing,” was the answer, “except the body of our Lord.” “Since you have already,” says he, “provided yourself with another physician, my presence here is unnecessary,” and he left the apartment instantly. When Albertus Basa, physician to the king of Poland, visited Paracelsus in the city of Basel, he carried him to see a patient whose strength was completely exhausted, and which, in his opinion, it was impossible to restore; but Paracelsus, wishing to make a parade of his skill, administered to him three drops of his laudanum, and invited him to dine with him next day.[147] The invitation was accepted, and the sick man dined next day with his physician.
Towards the end of the year 1527 a disgraceful dispute into which he entered brought his career, as a professor, to a sudden termination. The canon Cornelius, of Lichtenfels, who had been long a martyr to the gout, employed him as his physician, and promised him one hundred florins if he could cure him. Paracelsus made him take three pills of laudanum, and having thus freed him from pain, demanded the sum agreed upon; but Lichtenfels refused to pay him the whole of it. Paracelsus summoned him before the court, and the magistrate of Basle decided that the canon was bound to pay only the regular price of the medicine administered. Irritated at this decision, our intoxicated professor uttered a most violent invective against the magistrate, who threatened to punish him for his outrageous conduct. His friends advised him to save himself by flight. He took their advice, and thus abdicated his professorship. But, by this time, his celebrity as a teacher had been so completely destroyed by his foolish and immoral conduct, that he had lost all his hearers. In consequence of this state of things, his flight from Basle produced no sensation whatever in that university.
Paracelsus betook himself, in the first place, to Alsace, and sent for his faithful follower, the bookseller, Operinus, together with the whole of his chemical apparatus. In 1528 we find him at Colmar, where he recommenced his ambulating life of a theosophist, which he had led during his youth. His book upon syphilis, known at that time by the name of Morbus Gallicus, was dedicated at Colmar, to the chief magistrate of Colmar, Hieronymus Bonerus.[148] In 1531 he was at Saint-Gallen; in 1535, at Pfeffersbade, and in 1536, at Augsburg, where he dedicated his Chirurgia Magna to Malhausen. At the request of John de Leippa, Marshal of Bohemia, he undertook a journey into Moravia; as that nobleman, having been informed that Paracelsus understood the method of curing the gout radically, was anxious to put himself under his care. Paracelsus lived for a long time at Kroman, and its environs. John de Leippa, instead of receiving any benefit from the medicines administered to him, became daily worse, and at last died. This was the fate also of the lady of Zerotin, in whom the remedies of Paracelsus produced no fewer than twenty-four epileptic fits in one day. Paracelsus, instead of waiting the disgrace with which the death of this lady would have overwhelmed him, announced his intention of going to Vienna, that he might see how they would treat him in that capital.
It is said, that from Vienna he went into Hungary; but in 1538, we find him in Villach, where he dedicated his Chronica et Origo Carinthiæ to the states of Carinthia.[149] His book, De Natura Rerum, had been dedicated to Winkelstein, and the dedication is dated also at Villach, in the year 1537.[150] In 1540 he was at Mindelheim, and in 1541, at Strasburg, where he died, in St. Stephen’s hospital, in the forty-eighth year of his age.
To form an accurate idea of this most extraordinary man, we must attend to his habits, and to the situation in which he was placed. He had acquired such a habit of moving about, that he assures us himself he found it impossible for him to continue for any length of time in one place. He was always surrounded by a number of followers, whom neither his habits of intoxication, nor the foolish and immoral conduct in which he was accustomed to indulge, could induce to forsake him. The most celebrated of these was Operinus, a printer at Basle, on whom Paracelsus lavishes the most excessive praises, in his book De Morbo Gallico. But Operinus loaded his master with obloquy, being provoked at him because he had not made him acquainted with the secret of the philosopher’s stone, as he had promised to do. We must therefore be cautious in believing the stories that he relates to the discredit of his master. We know the names of two others of his followers; Francis, who assures us that Paracelsus was devoted to the transmutation of metals; and George Vetter, who considered him as a magician; as was the opinion also of Operinus. Paracelsus himself, speaks of Dr. Cornelius, whom he calls his secretary, and in honour of whom he wrote several of his libels. Other libels are dedicated to Doctors Peter, Andrew, and Ursinus, to the licentiate Pancrace, and to Mr. Raphael. On this occasion he complains bitterly of the infidelity of his servants, who, he says, had succeeded in stealing from him several of his secrets; and had by this means been enabled to establish their reputation. He accuses equally the barbers and bathers that followed him, and is no less severe upon the physicians of every country through which he travelled.
When we attempt to form an accurate conception of the medical and philosophical opinions of this singular man, we find ourselves beset with almost insurmountable difficulties. His statements are so much at variance with each other, in his different pieces, and so much confusion reigns with respect to the order of publication, that we know not what to fix on as his last and maturest opinions. His style is execrable; filled with new words of his own coining, and of mysticisms either introduced to excite the admiration of the ignorant, or from the fanaticism and credulity of the writer, who was undoubtedly, to a considerable extent, the dupe of his own impostures. That he was in possession of the philosopher’s stone, or of a medicine capable of prolonging life to an indefinite length, as he all along asserted, he could not himself believe; but he had boasted so long and so loudly of his wonderful cures, and of the efficacy of his medicines, that there can be no doubt that he ultimately placed implicit faith in them. The blunders of the transcribers whom he employed to copy his works, may perhaps account for some of the contradictions which they contain. But how can we look for a regular system of opinions from a man who generally dictated his works when in a state of intoxication, and thus laboured under an almost constant deprivation of reason.