There are lives that cannot be smoothed. This is one of them.
A man from a learned house who drew his best knowledge from people who had never seen a university from the inside. A physician who, at the height of his career, burned the recognised textbooks of his profession and fled the city a few months later. An author of whom hardly anything was printed in his lifetime and whose name has outlasted the centuries since.
A name of his own choosing
The man sought today as Paracelsus was baptised Theophrastus von Hohenheim, in full Philippus Aureolus Theophrastus Bombastus von Hohenheim. In the sixteenth century a scholar's own name was no fixed possession. It was latinised, exchanged, a new one chosen, and this choice was an announcement.
Even the first name was no accident, for it refers to Theophrastus of Eresos, the pupil of Aristotle, and the father, himself a man of learning, knew what he was bestowing. Paracelsus, on the other hand, the son gave himself. It is the name of a man who stakes a claim before he has redeemed it.
The furnaces of Tyrol
The father, Wilhelm Bombast von Hohenheim, was a licensed physician of the Swabian lesser nobility. His son was born near Einsiedeln at the end of 1493 or the beginning of 1494. It cannot be said more precisely; the sources contradict one another, and the scholarly literature has recorded both years ever since.
Around 1502 the father moved to Villach in Carinthia and practised there. He gave the first lessons himself, joined by clergy, among them Bishop Eberhard Paumgartner and the auxiliary bishop of Freising, Matthias Schacht.
The second school stood in Tyrol. In Schwaz Sigmund Fugger maintained laboratories, and there the young Hohenheim worked for a considerable time. What came out of the mountain was roasted, smelted and separated until the metals lay apart. He came to know the furnaces, the grips of the trade and the men who handled them. What befell those who worked with mercury every day he saw there and later wrote down.
The years of wandering
Italy followed. In Ferrara he is said to have obtained the doctorate of medicine around 1515, yet the university records are incomplete, and the degree is not certain. What is certain is that afterwards he lived for some fifteen years without a fixed place. He travelled through France, Spain, the Netherlands, England, Hungary and the German lands. In 1519 he is documented in Copenhagen. That he reached as far as Moscow and Constantinople is reported, without it being possible to prove.
On the road he went on learning, from those who worked with their hands. Whoever is travelling for so long possesses his knowledge and little else.
In 1526 he settled in Strasbourg. A year later he received everything at once.
The rupture in Basel
In Basel Johannes Frobenius printed the books that were read throughout Europe, and his house was the city's foremost address for scholars. Frobenius suffered from an ailment of the leg. He had Hohenheim summoned, and the treatment succeeded within a short time. So the sources of the sixteenth century report.
Among the printer's circle was Erasmus of Rotterdam, the most widely read scholar on the continent. He wrote to the newcomer, “May fortune hold you fast here in Basel.”
At first it did. In 1527 Hohenheim became city physician of Basel, the physician of the whole city paid by the council, and in addition received permission to lecture at the university.
He lectured in German. Latin was the language of every university and governed who might enter and who might not. The recipes of a house are written in a script that only the head chef can read. He cooks no better for it, but he remains the only one who can be asked. Whoever hangs these recipes on the wall, in the language of all who stand in the room, takes no one's skill and everyone's precedence.
Whoever lectured in German spoke to barber-surgeons, craftsmen and alchemists, to precisely those who had until then been left standing outside. The picture carries no further, for a head chef keeps his post, a scholar of the year 1527 does not. Contemporaries called him the “Luther of medicine”, and it was not meant as a distinction.
On 24 June 1527, on St John's Eve, fires burned throughout the city. Into one of them he threw the books by which every examination was conducted at the time, the works of Galen and the Canon of Avicenna. They were not textbooks among many; they were the measure.
On the town halls hung the iron ell against which every cloth merchant tested his goods. Whoever melts down the ell does not say that he is of a different opinion. He says that from tomorrow, measuring begins anew.
After that, things moved quickly. Church, nobility and university turned against him. A few months after the successful treatment Frobenius died, and with him Hohenheim lost his backing.
A dispute over a fee came to court, he insulted his opponents there, and at the beginning of February 1528 he left the city to forestall banishment. He had stayed less than twelve months. Office, patrons and city were gone; one principle remained.
“Not to suppose, but to know.”
Stars and poison
In 1530 he wrote the Paragranum, his treatise on the foundations of the art of healing. For him it was no single discipline. It rested on four pillars, on philosophy, astronomy, alchemy and virtue. Alchemy is one of these four. Distillation, which he brought from the workshop into the art of healing, thus stands on equal terms with philosophy.
A year later the Opus Paramirum followed, his book on the three first substances. Not every one of the four pillars has outlasted the centuries. Astronomy in his sense stands in no textbook of medicine any more; the preparation of remedies in the furnace stands in every one.
Astronomy was nevertheless no side note to him. His age thought of heaven and man as a single structure. The stars were to him what the calendar is to the farmer, a grid in which he placed his work. What he called magic was for him no opposite of knowledge but a way of questioning nature. He was reproached for it all the same.
He prepared his remedies in the furnace instead of mixing them in the mortar. It was precisely there that his accusers took aim. They charged him with giving his patients metals and minerals, substances regarded as poison.
In 1538 he replied with the Septem Defensiones, seven defences against his opponents. In the third he defends the remedy made of metal and mineral, and he begins with a question. “If you would rightly interpret every poison, what is there that is not poison?” The answer follows in the same breath. “All things are poison and nothing is without poison. The dose alone makes a thing not a poison.” Toxicology, the science of poisons, traces itself back to this passage to this day and calls him its father.
Fame after death
After his flight the wandering life began anew. Colmar in 1528, Nuremberg in 1529, St. Gallen in 1531, then changing places in the Alpine region. In these years the name he had given himself prevailed.
Almost nothing of it was printed. A printing cost so much that a publisher or a patron had to bear it, and both considered carefully whose name they set on a title page. In 1536 “Die grosse Wundarznei”, the great surgery, appeared in Ulm, his only great success in the book trade and one of the few works he saw printed himself. By far the greater part was left lying.
He was passed on all the same, by hand. A recipe that never stood in a cookery book nevertheless lies in thirty kitchens, because every cook has copied it out. Whoever is printed enters the libraries. Whoever is copied enters the workshops.
A copy made by hand, however, is no facsimile. Something is added, and something falls away. That is why writings bear his name to this day that are not his, and why the technique that tradition attributes to him is more a legacy than a document.
In 1541 Paracelsus was in Salzburg. On 21 September he dictated his will at the inn “Zum Weissen Ross” in the Kaigasse; three days later he died.
In accordance with his last wishes he was buried in the cemetery of the almshouse of St. Sebastian, which then still lay outside the city. The gravestone was donated by his friend Michael Setznagel, a Salzburg official. Two hundred years later the archbishop had a monument erected in the porch of the church, and there the remains rest in a hollow chamber to this day.
Judgements of him diverge, then as now. Some count him a founder, others a braggart, and his second name Bombastus is not entirely innocent of this. The grave may be visited.