Paracelsus: Light of Europe. A brief history. Parts I-III

Daphnis, 2021

This article aims at reassessing the significance of Paracelsus’ Herbarius, a work deemed a loose collection of field notes and juvenilia by Karl Sudhoff, Paracelsus’ most famous editor and scholar. By comparing it to Von den natürlichen Dingen, another treatise that overlaps extensively with the Herbarius (four of the six Gewechse discussed in the Herbarius are also dealt with in Von den natürlichen Dingen), the article suggests that both texts, although unfinished, must be read as well-crafted treatises rather than mere drafts. It also examines two hypotheses concerning the relationship between the two treatises: the Herbarius will alternatively be read as a simplified version of Von den natürlichen Dingen, written concomitantly in order to be understandable by the “common man” (gemeine Mann); and as its preliminary version, further elaborated upon by Paracelsus several years after he wrote the Herbarius. By tracing the early reception of the Herbarius, the article attempts to und...

Nephrology Dialysis Transplantation, 1996

One of the most intriguing figures in the history of Renaissance medicine is Paracelsus. He lived through a transitional period of science when Europe, having sloughed most of its medieval sheath and nearly through the first half of Renaissance scholarship, characterized by revival of early classicism, was just beginning to formulate the rudiments of its modern form. Parallel to the changes then occurring in religion with its Reformation, and in the arts with its free Baroque style, science, in general, and medicine, in particular, also were embarking on something new and completely different. This was a decisive turning away from the doctrines of the ancients to the more direct investigative approach that was to define medicine by the end of the sixteenth century. It was a century of great reformers (Luther, Vesalius, Pare, Michelangelo, Erasmus, Copernicus) amongst whom Paracelsus pursued a meteoric rise and came to occupy a distinctive, albeit challenged, position. Paracelsus was born in the winter of 1493, in the Swiss village of Einsiedeln, to Wilhelm Bombast von Hohenheim, a graduate of Tubingen and practising physician assigned to the hospital of the Benedictine Abbey there, and his wife, Els Ochsner, a bondwoman of the local Bishop. He was an only child, whose mother died shortly after his birth. His early education was provided by his father, who moved to Villach in Carinthia in 1502 and practised the"* until his death in 1534. Having decided to study medicine, and according to the custom of the time, Paracelsus began to travel to different centers of medical learning. However, where most students would go to a handful centers, he rambled throughout Europe (by his account to: Spain,

2014

The man who styled himself Paracelsus (1483-1541) lived a turbulent life in turbulent times. Vastly ambitious, he professed a new therapeutic that was at once Christian and Germanic. Developed in dozens of treatises that cover fourteen stout volumes in the standard edition of his medical and philosophical works,1 it was specifically Christian because based on a view of Man and Nature that he found in the Bible and preached in lay sermons.2 In this view, God created diseases and remedies as part of Nature, the diseases had natural causes, and the cures were revealed to Man over time. By the end of time, which Paracelsus thought was fast approaching, all cures would be known, and they would be natural ones. The good physician only appeared to work wonders.

2019

Aisthetics of the Spirits: Spirits in Early Modern Science, Religion, Literature and Music, edited by Steffen Schneider, 2015

The Complete Works of Paracelsus: the Huser Edition (1589-1591)., 2013