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Paracelsus (1493, Einsiedeln, Switzerland) – 1541, Salzburg, Austria) was the main author of the medical-pharmaceutical revolution of the Renaissance against the established thought of the 16th century.
His full name was Theophrastus Philippus Aureolus Bombastus von Hohenheim and he was the son of a country doctor. He received a humanistic education in religious centers. He studied at universities in Basel, Bologna, Vienna and Ferrara, where he earned his doctorate in medicine.
In Villach (Austria) he observed the way of working in iron mines and learned the principles of metallurgy and chemistry; He later increased this knowledge in the silver mines in Tyrol.
During his travels he came into contact with the town’s doctors, barber surgeons and healers. They were his true teachers, although he considered that the best possible teacher was Nature. As a doctor he prepared his medications himself.
Around 1526 he settled in Strasbourg. He was called to treat a serious ailment to the humanist J. Foebenius, the most famous editor of Basel. Foebenius, who was a personal friend of Erasmus, had been evicted by his doctors, who wanted to cut off his leg. Paracelsus cured him without having to go to those drastic extremes.
“You have saved Frobenius, who is half my life, from the world of shadows,” wrote Erasmus of Rotterdam in a letter to Paracelsus.
Under the protection of the scholar and reformer John Ecolampadio, Paracelsus obtained a professorship at the Faculty of Medicine in Basel in 1526, a city that was at that time one of the main centers of Renaissance humanism.
He warns his students that he “does not follow the classics; “He only believes in what he has discovered with his own strength and has verified with practice and experience.”
He traveled to Nuremberg, Baratzhausen and St. Gallen where he practiced medicine simply, he continued to teach his classes in inns or taverns, where people from all social classes listened to them, while at the same time he wrote his works.
In the last stage of his life he became a lay preacher and traveled through Tyrol, Bavaria and Bohemia, dying in 1541 in the Salzburg hospital due to liver cancer.
As a philosopher, he was a follower of Neoplatonism, Hippocrates, Lullio, and Vilanova.
Medical Paracelsus
As a doctor, he devised a practical treatment for the healing of chronic wounds and ulcers, so widespread at that time; he studied the diseases of miners; He identified tuberculosis and silicosis as occupational diseases and was the first to recognize the congenital form of syphilis.
He administered to his patients those medications that experience had taught him were useful against the illness they suffered.
He was an absolute supporter of chemical medicines, which until then had hardly been used. He established the foundations of Yatrochemistry. He practiced comprehensive medicine, in which he did not admit the separation between doctor-surgeon-pharmacist, consequently demanding from anyone who dedicated himself to it absolute personal knowledge of everything necessary to cure the disease, and he accepted, as the main weapon to fight against the disease, to the medicine, which the doctor had to know how to look for, prepare and use. He was above all a therapist, who dedicated his best works to the study of medicine.
Paracelsus and medicine
As he explained in his ParagranumParacelsus’ medicine was supported on four columns:
- A. Philosophy- Total scientific knowledge of visible and invisible nature, of which man is the main axis: “a doctor is someone who knows about the invisible, about what has no name or matter and yet has its action.”
- B. Astronomy- Since man as a microcosm feels the action of the Cosmos and with it everything it contains, influenced by the stars, man also has part of them within himself.
- C. Alchemy- In which Paracelsus believed, not as a way to obtain gold from the transmutation of metals, but to obtain the secrets of Nature, the true teacher, the one who made the best medicines.
- D. Virtue- The fundamental ethical basis of every man of science – love of neighbor and of the profession – and a scientific structure based on progression: see-know-understand-know and, therefore, be able to do.
Paracelsus and illness
Thus he accepted five causes of disease (ens):
- 1. Ens astrale (astral entity): Diseases may be due to this entity due to meteorological changes, or due to the influence of the stars, since man depends on the Cosmos.
- 2. Ens veneni (poison entity): diseases caused by biochemical alterations; This entity can be any substance that penetrates our body: a medicine, a food, a poison…
- 3. Ens naturali (natural entity): or predisposition of the body towards such disease.
- 4. Ens espirituati (spiritual entity): or influence that their livelihood, family, social coexistence exerts on the being…
- 5. Ens Dei (divine entity): or action of God, an omnipotent being who can send us an illness as punishment or as a test.
Paracelsus and the medicine
- He was the first to obtain laudanum from opium and that is what he called it.
- He used alcohol to obtain the quintessences.
- He used mercury a lot, either as metal or as salt.
- He used basic Hg sulfate, later called Turbit Mineral, against syphilis, instead of using guaiac, as other doctors prescribed, whom he called “[…] wooden doctors […]”. He obtained the corrosive sublimated Hg. and calomel: mercury chloride.
- • He obtained and used antimony and called antimony oxychloride “mercurius vitea”.
- He mentioned Zinc, which he called the bastard metal. He also knew the use of lead, arsenic, iron, copper, cobalt and bismuth.
- He invented preparations such as the “elixir of property”, the “specific anodyne” and the “spirit vitrioli antiepilectidis” or Hoffman’s Liqueur that, together with laudanum, have passed down to posterity.
Plays
- Great Surgerywhich exerted a great influence;
- Opus Paramirum, written in Saint Gallen;
- And his main medical work, Das Busch Paragranumwritten between 1529 and 1530, where the four columns that supported his medicine are defined: Philosophy, astronomy, alchemy and virtue;
All his life he considered that the purpose of medicine was love for one’s neighbor and that serving the people was the doctor’s mission, instilling in his students that the first thing for a doctor should always be his patients and that, in order to dedicate himself to curing them, The basis of their knowledge would always be found where God had placed it: in Nature.
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