The Luther of medicine?

The man christened Philip Theophrastus Bombast von Hohenheim, in a mining town in Switzerland in the last decade of the 15th century, has been more mythologised than described: as a Faust, a Prometheus, a holy fool, a eunuch, a necromancer. It is not hard to see why he was attractive to the Romantic poets and remains — even in the works of J. K. Rowling — shorthand for a whiff of brimstone. He’s a myth. But, like most myths, he’s also an idea, and an interesting one.

Paracelsus himself was a stocky, odd little bloke. Contemporaries attest that he was often drunk and seldom changed his clothes. He seemed, much of the time, as mad as a badger. He was vastly boastful, and heroically rude about his enemies. No sooner did he come upon potential allies than he alienated them. He wrote bad German and, when it came to it, terrible Latin. His language was impenetrable, abounding with ill-defined neologisms such as Aquaster, Scaiolae, Adech, Enochinum, Gamonymum, and many of his theories were self-contradictory in the extreme.

How wrong was Paracelsus? Very wrong indeed. He believed that you could turn lead into gold; he claimed you could breed a homunculus from a mixture of sperm and horseshit; he prescribed sulphuric acid, mercury and antimony as cures for illnesses; he thought that a wound from a blade could be healed by applying a salve not to the wound but to the blade that had been responsible for it; he reckoned that if you planted a man’s feet in the earth, he could live for a month without food.

At the same time, he hit by accident on a number of important ideas. He groped towards biochemistry, and he had the idea that nature (through and as a part of God) worked to the good.