Paracelsus: The Rebellious Doctor Who Defied Tradition

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I recently found myself going down the rabbit hole of Japanese manga and anime fandom online. Now, this is something I know nothing about. I’ve never really been into anime or manga, but I was fascinated to learn about Van Hohenheim or ‘Hohenheim of Light’, a character who is a powerful alchemist in the anime series Fullmetal Alchemist, clearly inspired by the historical alchemist Theophrastus Bombastus von Hohenheim (1493-1541), better known as Paracelsus. From what I read, it seems that this series uses many alchemical concepts, including the homunculus, which I will talk about later. Of course, it’s sensationalised and highly exaggerated – in all fairness, the series isn’t pretending to be historically accurate or anything. But still, centuries after Paracelsus, it’s incredible to see how he is still a part of the conversation when it comes to alchemy. Paracelsus was one of the most controversial people of his day and his work and those of his followers deeply shaped the history of science and medicine. So I thought it would be interesting to introduce him (even though he’s not remotely as handsome as ‘Hohenheim of Light’) and to talk a little bit about Paracelsianism too, from its connection to magic and alchemy, Protestantism and reform, to the idea of chemical medicine, and even creating life from dead matter – like a proto-Frankenstein tale of sorts, believe it or not! Of course, although this is a long text, it’s just an introduction to all these subjects, and if you want to learn more, I highly suggest checking out the reading recommendations at the end. Now, without further ado, let’s dive into it!

An Adventurous Character

Paracelsus was born in the Swiss village of Einsiedeln around 1493. His parents’ marriage was what we could call ‘mixed-class’, since his father was descended from the nobility, although he was illegitimate, and his mother was a bond servant of a convent nearby. This meant that Paracelsus was a ‘semi-serf’ – when he died, for instance, his belongings could be claimed by the religious authorities who had owned his mother’s labour. I won’t go into too much detail here, but his origins were very likely an obstacle to his social and professional rise, although he eventually became internationally renowned. And it also helps us to understand his sort of ‘self-made man’ persona.

Paracelsus’ father was a physician, who taught him much about medicine, botany, mineralogy and mining (this will be crucial in a bit) plus natural philosophy. They moved to southern Austria, where Paracelsus attended the Bergschule, a mining school where his father taught. There, pupils would learn about mining operations and metals, such as iron, mercury, copper and alum. Paracelsus would have learnt about these substances growing beneath the earth and how they could be transformed and combined. He would have heard of alchemists’ quest to transform base metals such as lead into gold. He was also tutored privately, including by four bishops. Religion and magic were a big part of his education, as was the focus on practical knowledge. And you can see all of these strands in his works. Paracelsus attended university for a time, but he was definitely not a fan. He would later write how ‘high colleges produce many high asses’.

Instead, he preferred to wander and travel throughout Europe, including places such as England, Scotland and Ireland. He became an army surgeon in the wars happening in the Netherlands, where he developed his skills, and he went as far as Russia. He was even imprisoned before escaping and going from Lithuania to Hungary, before working as an army surgeon again in Italy. He eventually travelled to Egypt, Arabia, and the Levant, plus Constantinople. But he wasn’t just looking for adventure. Paracelsus wanted to learn about alchemy in practice, but also to discover the hidden ‘secrets of nature’. For him, all this knowledge – and knowledge in general, really – was based on experience:

The ‘book of nature’ was the only one worth learning from, and you had to do that through travel. Paracelsus described each land as a page to be read, that is, to be experienced.

This was not unique to him. If you’ve been following the website, you might remember the text I made about Leonardo Fioravanti, a surgeon from Bologna who also wanted to reform medicine. Fioravanti’s story has much in common with Paracelsus. Still, the idea of learning from ‘unlikely sources’ can be found in many other popular books of the time, in which the importance of practical knowledge is highlighted, and how this knowledge often comes from people in the margins, in terms of gender, social status, or age, as you can tell by passages in these books, such as: 

This was one of the main ways in which traditional medicine was being challenged in the period. And Paracelsus became one of its most vocal opponents.

Rejecting the Medical Establishment

Paracelsus tells you all you need to know with the way he starts styling himself by 1529 – as Para-Celsus, so going beyond Celsus. Aulus Cornelius Celsus, to be precise  (c. 25 BCE – c. 50 CE), a very respected 1st-century Roman medical writer. So his new name made a statement about how his new medicine surpassed the ancient authorities so revered in universities. 

This ‘traditional’ medicine was based on a mix of Greco-Roman traditions and medieval contributions by Islamic physicians, so think of a combination of scholasticism, Aristotle, Hippocrates, Galen, and Ibn Sina, ‘The Prince of Physicians’. This medicine relied heavily on the humoral theory, the idea that the body had four humours which had to be balanced for someone to be healthy, and regulating the non-naturals – so sleep, exercise, emotions, diet, evacuation, and the air. This was the kind of medicine that was taught at Western universities: a Galenic medicine, with a heavy focus on theory over practice, relying on logic, and on ancient authorities. For Paracelsus though, logic darkened the true light of nature, and he called Aristotle a ‘sharp illusionist’. For him, the more learned someone was, the more their mind had been perverted. Paracelsus was not the only one to criticise this kind of medicine, but Paracelsianism kind of structured these criticisms and, more importantly, offered a new medical model.

After leaving university and after years of travelling, Paracelsus settled in Strasbourg and quickly became a very popular physician. By 1527, when he was appointed town physician in Basel, Switzerland, his disregard for tradition was clear. His new position meant that he became a professor at the city’s medical college, a stronghold of Galenic medicine. He was supposed to lecture physicians and students there, which he decided to do based on his practical experience with the ‘secrets of disease’. His colleagues weren’t thrilled, to say the least, and even denied him the room to lecture. But, to the local authorities’ shock, he decided to open the invitation to his lectures to anyone interested – and he would teach wherever he could. Plus, he chose to do so in common German, rather than in Latin, the language of universities. Now, keep in mind that just ten years before this, Martin Luther had written his Theses on Indulgences, criticising the Catholic establishment. Paracelsus seemed to be doing the same with medicine. He was even called a ‘Medical Luther’. Later, he would write:

As though that wasn’t enough to enrage the university physicians, a few weeks later Paracelsus reportedly went even further: he burnt the books of Ibn Sina and Galen, in a clear sign of his hostility towards learned medicine. Again, this echoed Luther burning a papal bull that threatened excommunication.

As you can tell, Paracelsus caused a lot of controversy. Just imagine what physicians thought when he argued that any barber or midwife had more common sense than Aristotle and Galen! As other medical reformers of the time, like Fioravanti whom I quoted earlier, this confrontational style towards the medical establishment meant that he didn’t stay anywhere for long. The criticisms against him were vitriolic. Poems were circulating in Basel mocking him, calling him ‘Cacophrastus’, a sort of scatological pun on his name, Theophrastus. His medicine was criticised as unethical and dangerous, and he was called vain and coarse, full of ‘peasant wisdom’. But Paracelsus was unfazed. He wrote:

But, if Paracelsus was rejecting Galenic medicine, what was he proposing instead?

Iatrochemistry

Iatrochemistry, or medical chemistry, is key to understanding Paracelsus. His time in the mining school had been crucial to how he saw the world. His new natural philosophy was based on what he called chemical principles: salt, mercury and sulphur were the primary substances in nature, according to him. He considered the traditional Galenic and Aristotelic system of humours, qualities and elements to be too ‘passive’ and associated them with femininity. His new triad, the tria prima, on the other hand, was composed of active materials, which he believed to be more ‘male’ in their nature. (Of course, it’s easy to see just how much the beliefs about gender and the roles people played in society influenced his thinking, but I digress.) He associated salt with solidity, spirituousness with mercury and sulphur with inflammability and described the world as being full of vital and spiritual forces.

Now, why is that relevant to medicine? Well, Paracelsus thought that poisonous emanations from minerals in the earth could cause disease. For instance, he wrote how ‘miners’ disease’, known today as silicosis, was caused by inhaling metal vapours. And here there’s another fundamental difference between Paracelsianism and Galenic medicine. Paracelsus believed that diseases came from outside the body, that they originated from contact with contaminating materials, and not from internal humoral imbalances. Traditionally, if you understood the body’s health as being dependent on the balance between the humours, that meant that treatments tended to ‘correct’ the imbalance: so, if someone had an excess of phlegm, a cold and moist humour, they would need a remedy of opposite qualities to make the body warmer and drier. Paracelsus, on the other hand, believed in ‘curing like with like’. Physicians should treat someone ‘poisoned’ by minerals with another mineral, essentially, instead of just herbal remedies. Now, that might sound dangerous. And it was. But, for Paracelsus, the body had its own, ‘internal alchemist’, as it were, meaning that it was capable of separating what was harmful from what was helpful when ingested. He wrote that ‘what makes a man ill also heals him’, if in small doses – so, the idea is that it is the dose that makes the poison. During an outbreak of plague in Sterzing in 1534, for instance, it’s said that he treated many people with a remedy made of bread and a tiny bit of the person’s excrement. Disgusting, I know, and I can’t see how that was effective.

Still, these chemical remedies could be particularly helpful in dealing with new diseases, such as syphilis, which he recommended should be treated with formulas using mercury to be taken internally. Chemical remedies could contain iron, copper sulfate, and sulphur too. Of course, using chemical medicines wasn’t something he just invented. Since antiquity, writers such as Dioscorides had discussed chemical and mineral remedies, and the same goes for medieval physicians and alchemists, such as Arnald de Villanova (?1240-1311) and Ramon Lull (c. 1235-1315) – and they had all influenced Paracelsus. These earlier writers had praised distillation as a way of making herbs more potent by obtaining their essences and in the 15th century, distillation had become widely popular, especially in German-speaking areas, thanks to the publication of Hieronymus Brunschwig’s (c.1450-1512) books. Paracelsus wasn’t creating new medicines in a vacuum, there already existed a tradition connecting herbal and chemical medicine.

What was new about Paracelsus was a move towards specificity in medicine. Disease had a specific, external cause. It was an entity – and you can see the parallels with modern medicine and the ontological theory of disease. Not only were diseases connected to specific body parts (as opposed to the more holistic Galenic view of medicine), but they should be treated with specific remedies, which could be very extreme. Many of these drastic remedies contained antimony, which is known today as a moderately toxic semimetallic element, which has some properties similar to arsenic, another ingredient widely used in medicine in the last centuries. Paracelsus would prescribe oil of antimony to patients suffering from leprosy; to treat such an aggressive disease, he thought you needed an aggressive remedy. When patients were given these treatments, they could respond very quickly. There were visible effects, and that might have made them more popular – the same could be said for many drugs prescribed by empirics and charlatans at the time, too. This was in sharp contrast with Galenic medicines, which just weren’t as dramatic. Plus, Paracelsus also suggested medicines that were enhanced versions of recipes already known, so he developed a new formula for pain, using opium, which he called laudanum. (Just a side note – this laudanum was very different in composition from the one that later became popular in Europe, especially in the 18th and 19th centuries).

Anyway, Paracelsus was interested in where within the body diseases could be localised. This is one of the reasons why, like many other physicians of the period, he wasn’t impressed by anatomy, or dissection. He wrote that it should be called ‘dead anatomy’, as it wouldn’t clarify how to cure any ailments or how the body worked, essentially leading nowhere. For us in the 21st century, that sounds very counter-intuitive, I know, but dissection was very controversial. In any case, Paracelsus did think that you could potentially do a dissection of urine of sorts: uroscopy, or the analysis of urine, had been a staple in medical practice for centuries, with physicians analysing colour, smell etc to diagnose disease. However, the idea of doing a chemical dissection of urine was new. It could be done using a big cylinder, corresponding to the body. According to Paracelsus, after being distilled, the different components of urine, including mercury, sulphur, and salt, would be deposited in different parts of the vessel, and that would indicate where disease was located in the body. Of course, that sounds outlandish, but Paracelsus was trying to find new ways of solving age-old problems.

Paracelsus was starting to understand the body through a chemical lens, and to use chemical remedies, but this was still a time in which chemistry and alchemy were pretty much indistinguishable. His work definitely helped create the scientific field of chemistry and, of course, reform medicine, but we should be careful not to only think of him as someone ‘scientific’ and forward-looking. That would be anachronistic and just reductive. Paracelsus believed in the spiritual nature of the universe, and in magic, as did many of his contemporaries.

Magic, Alchemy, and Medicine

In the 16th and 17th centuries, people did believe in magic. And not just people who weren’t instructed, but philosophers, scientists, jurists, and theologians. However, when later, 18th and 19th-century historians wrote about Paracelsus and his contribution to the scientific revolution and the history of medicine, they tended to leave out the mysticism behind his thinking. Paracelsus deeply believed that the universe, the macrocosm, was connected to the human body, the microcosm, as many of his contemporaries did. So the doctrine of signatures still played a big part in his thinking. The doctrine of signatures is a fascinating subject, and I wrote a little bit about it here. But to sum it up, it’s an idea that dates back to antiquity and was popular through the medieval and early modern periods. It was believed that when God created the world, he imbued plants (and animals and minerals too, to a smaller degree) with hidden properties with the power to cure people suffering from illnesses. And the way people would learn all this would be by following clues – by paying attention to smells, colours, textures, and the format of the plant. For instance, a man who was suffering from impotence could use a remedy made with orchid roots, which resembled testicles. You get the idea. Astrological medicine also played a big part in how Paracelsus thought about medicine, with specific stars and planets affecting different body parts. A good physician should be aware of all these correspondences in nature to treat their patients.

And here we get to how natural magic and natural philosophy, as well as medicine, were connected in this period, and how alchemy could be a way of manipulating nature. For Paracelsus, as for many others at the time, such as Marsilio Ficino (1433-99), Agrippa von Nettesheim (1487-1535) and Giambattista della Porta (1535-1615). Natural magic was essentially understanding how the universe, the celestial world, interacted with the natural and human worlds, and how these connections could be influenced and manipulated by people. Magic came from God, but it could be corrupted by necromancers. Still, Paracelsus wrote how ‘people should know what the Devil knows’, meaning all kinds of magic. Physicians in particular should reclaim magic and restore it to its original purpose of helping and healing people.

Although his medicine was clearly rooted in Christianism, Paracelsus was fascinated with mysticism in general and he arguably opened the way to thinking about the connection between the mind and bodily diseases. In fact, the psychologist Carl Jung (1875-1961) even saw him as a pioneer in ’empirical psychological healing science’ as well as chemical medicine. To give you an idea, Paracelsus thought that St Vitus’ dance, now called Sydenham chorea, a condition characterised by the uncontrollable trembling and jerking movements of the limbs, was an ‘imaginative illness’. He believed patients should abstain from sexual relations and fast, but also that they should create a doll that resembled them, a poppet of sorts, and destroy it. If this sounds to you like superstition, you’re not wrong. And this is why, although some aspects of Paracelsus’ work make him a pioneer, he was also very much a man of his time. Magical cures coexisted with chemical remedies.

This cosmological, magical, religious framework of Paracelsus’ writings wasn’t accepted by everyone. The German physician Andreas Libavius (1540-1616), who wrote Alchymia (1597), one of the foundational texts of chemistry as a discipline, criticised this Paracelsian cosmology and argued that chemical remedies should be combined with the Galenic medicine practised by university physicians, merging the two systems, rather than having iatrochemistry take over. But even then, it was too late to save Galenic medicine, which was being attacked on several fronts by medical reformers.

Paracelsus on the Rise

I told you a little bit about Paracelsus’ ideas. But let’s get back to the man himself. He had earned quite a reputation in Basel, with his controversial lectures and burning books and whatnot, and he was known for the prophecies he published, based on astrology, discussing things such as the 1531 comet, now known as Halley’s comet. By 1536, when the Great Surgery Book (Der grossen Wundartzey) was published, he had found several aristocratic patrons and made quite a lot of money. This was particularly important because, except for a few universities, he had largely been excluded from the academic world. When we think about patronage though, we tend to think of artists, such as Botticelli being supported by the Medici family. But patrons were just as important for physicians and naturalists like him as they were for artists. Money could mean being able to set up a laboratory for experimentation, and being a court physician could protect Paracelsus from being attacked by university physicians and by local colleges of physicians. More importantly, patronage legitimised Paracelsian doctrines as a valid medical model.

The same hadn’t happened with other would-be medical reformers, such as Leonardo Fioravanti. By the 1640s, Joseph Duchesne, the personal doctor to king Henry IV of France and a Paracelsian, listed lots of kings and princes as supporters of Paracelsianism, especially in German-speaking areas. And they were instrumental in spreading this new medicine. Otto Heinrich, the duke of Neuburg, was one of the first nobles to support Paracelsus and the duke’s collected manuscripts even form the base for the later, printed versions of Paracelsus’ works. Keep in mind that, in the early modern period, distillation and alchemy were discussed everywhere, and experimentation was a big part of court culture, from Henry IV’s court in Paris to the Medici court in Florence and Spanish palaces. In central and Eastern Europe, Paracelsianism was quickly spreading, with the courts in Prague and Vienna often holding public demonstrations of alchemical experimentation.

This was a time of reform and transformation, not just in medicine and science but also, of course, in terms of religion. And there is much overlap here. Paracelsus remained a Catholic, technically, but he was probably highly influenced by Protestantism – just remember how he was called the ‘Luther of physicians’. Paracelsus believed that both natural and spiritual knowledge could be found in nature, without the mediation of intermediaries such as universities. This echoed the Protestant idea of learning directly from the Bible without the direction of the Church. Not to mention that, like Luther, Paracelsus chose to write and lecture in German rather than in Latin. Plus, Paracelsus had reformist sentiments and beliefs which extended beyond religion, to the domain of social order. For instance, when there was social unrest, such as the peasant revolts against lords in German-speaking areas, Paracelsus tended to side with the peasants rather than the princes – the opposite of Luther. At the time of the civil war in England, Paracelsianism spread among protestants, not only because of the new medical ideas but also because of the religious reformism they associated with Paracelsus. In the 1640s, Puritans advocated for Paracelsianism, arguing that it was a more charitable and Christian kind of medicine.

This association was arguably there from the beginning. In Italy, in the second half of the 16th century, with the Catholic Reformation, Paracelsians were accused of heresy, and many of them went underground. Paracelsianism was linked with protestantism plus, the focus on magic probably didn’t help. Although he seems to have remained a Catholic throughout his life, books by Paracelsus were placed on the Index Expurgatorius, a list of books from which parts considered immoral or contradicting Catholicism were removed. And, especially after his death, his followers, including many political and religious radicals, developed Paracelsianism in such a way that it expanded Paracelsus’ reformist aura.

Gradually though, Paracelsian medicines spread and started to be adopted even by institutions that had long been strongholds of Galenic, humoral medicine. By the 1560s, many of the pharmacopoeias printed in German areas included chemical remedies. Decades later, the Venetian College of Apothecaries included in its 1642 list of approved medicines several alchemical cures, sometimes called ‘spagyric’ remedies. Official pharmacopoeias like these basically determined which medicines were acceptable; they acted as pharmaceutical guides, often listing the ingredients in formulas. In the famous 1618 Pharmacopoeia londinensis, there were parts dedicated to ‘chemical preparations’ and explanations on ‘salts, metals and minerals’. Over a hundred chemical formulas were printed side by side with the traditional herbal medicines. The pressure to take Paracelsian drugs seriously often came from royal courts, where Paracelsianism was thriving. For instance, in 1658, King Louis XIV of France was ill during a military campaign. Traditional remedies prescribed by the court physicians hadn’t worked. And, the story goes, a local Paracelsian doctor was able to cure the king with a drug using antimony that provoked vomiting. The medical faculty in Paris, which had long condemned using antimony, was forced to accept this vomit-inducing, wine-based formula, for better or for worse.

For now, let me tell you the tale of the homunculus.

Proto-Frankenstein Vibes…?

Ok, stick with me, because this part might seem a bit weird. And content warning: this bit is a slightly disgusting, if you want to skip it. In the early modern period, many people believed that rotting matter, such as a putrefied carcass or cadaver, could produce life, such as bees, for instance. Putrefying earth or mud was believed to generate insects and worms. Now, this might sound strange to us, but think about it. What could people observe, what would they notice? Keep in mind this is a time before germ theory, of course. Plus, there was a passage in the Bible saying: ‘let the Earth bring forth living creatures’ (Genesis 1:24), which could be read literally, meaning that God would have made the elements, especially the earth, capable of creating life.

Perhaps the most famous example of this idea of ‘spontaneous generation’ comes from one of my all-time favourite history books, Carlo Ginzburg’s The Cheese and the Worms, a masterpiece of microhistory whose title evokes this very idea. Ginzburg’s research focuses on a miller, Menocchio, who believed that life could be created through putrefying matter, such as cheese. I won’t get into too much detail about this, but suffice it to say that the idea of creating new life from decaying matter in a laboratory wouldn’t necessarily be absurd for people at the time. (And that’s exactly the premise of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, only combined with electricity, which was hotly debated in the scientific circles of her day.) Plus, some alchemical substances, like azoth, were believed to be able to give life and cure all illnesses – which was also said about the philosopher’s stone. So keep this in mind.

But we’re talking of insects and worms in the Renaissance. And the case of the homunculus – literally translated as a ‘little human being’ – is different. This was problematic because we’re talking about the artificial creation of a lifeform that would be similar to humans, and rational. So this had, of course, moral and religious implications and, not surprisingly, this possibility was met with pushback from those who deemed it unnatural – but many others were fascinated with the possibility. 

Drawing on this concept that new life could start with putrefaction and that the vital impulse in ‘seed’ would always strive to create life, the idea would be to use human semen, sealed in a vessel, like a flask, and to warm it in a gentle heat, until it putrefied. After 40 days, it would begin to move and, after 40 weeks, during which a chemical preparation made of human blood was added to it,  there would be a homunculus, a lifeform resembling a human being. (Keep in mind that a typical human pregnancy takes around 40 weeks, too.) In another version, the putrefied sperm would be placed inside a horse’s womb. (Makes you think of futuristic ectogenesis, doesn’t it?!) This being, the homunculus, appeared in several texts attributed to Paracelsus, and was described as ‘transparent’ and ‘bodiless’ so people have imagined it in many different ways, including the version from the anime I quoted at the very beginning of the text. In earlier versions, it was a golem-like creature. What is so interesting to me is that this whole idea illustrates the fascination many people at the time, especially Paracelsus, had with seeing the invisible, of finding out how things worked, and how the world was made. Of course it’s far-fetched, but, for something written centuries ago, it also sounds so modern, so sci-fi. This homunculus would act as a metaphor for human creation and creativity, not to mention ingenuity.

In any case, even though all this might sound crazy, it tells us a lot about the medical and scientific beliefs of the time. This homunculus wouldn’t be like a regular human child, even if it looked like one. Because it would be the product of art, or technique, rather than a natural process, this being would be born powerful and full of knowledge; contrary to a normal baby, the homunculus would know all the arts and secrets of nature. (The opposite of how naive Frankenstein’s monster was in the novel, too.) Also, just as a side note, in one of the texts, which is debatable whether Paracelsus wrote himself, it is said that, if instead of semen, you used menstrual blood, then it wouldn’t be a homunculus that would be created, but a basilisk. Yes, just like in Harry Potter. Basilisks were symbols of unnatural births, and so in another version, it came from an egg laid by a rooster rather than a hen, incubated by a toad. So this monster would be a metaphor for unnatural reproduction. In terms of menstruation, it’s significant that this is a monster that could kill just by its glance. Of course, this is reminiscent of myths and taboos about menstruation, from menstrual blood dulling mirrors to the story of the Medusa.

Having said that, this is not exactly a straightforward experiment to recreate. Few people at the time, even alchemists, would be interested in following this bizarre recipe. But the topic itself, the idea of creating life from dead matter, chemical palingenesis, was widely debated. Physicians and alchemists experimented in other ways, by trying to resuscitate dead animals and plants chemically, using Paracelsian ideas, such as Scheidung, or the separation of different parts from a substance, which could be done through distillation. For instance, mixing the ashes of burnt wood to distillates, heating it, and burying it. Joseph Duchesne, a follower of Paracelsus, wrote about this, and experimented with nettles – which, personally, sounds much better than the original formula! In the following centuries, people continued to experiment. Athanasius Kircher (1602-1680), a Jesuit scientist, even wrote how he made a demonstration to Queen Christina of Sweden in 1657, while the famous physician Jan Baptist Van Helmont (1580-1644) wrote that this experiment was impossible. Sir Kenelm Digby (1603-1665), also wrote that he was able to recreate the nettle experiment at the Gresham College in London in 1660. (By the way, just as a side note, a while back I went through the Digby family recipe book, which contains everything from medicine to alchemy to cosmetics, and I happened to come across Leonardo Fioravanti’s recipe for the Philosopher’s Stone, so it just goes to show how these people were aware of each other’s work and how interconnected was this network of early modern alchemists. And, if you have no idea what I’m talking about, please go check out my text on Leonardo Fioravanti, a charlatan/alchemist that I love.)

In any case, the main takeaway from the homunculus story is the idea of the enormous potential that alchemy and chemistry offered in exploring the world. And, lest we forget, the idea of producing human beings in a lab is very much a part of our present day (just think of IVF!) and of our future, too. Using alchemy to advance medicine and to explain cosmological ideas is a big part of Paracelsus’ work and his legacy. Arguably, for Paracelsus, the pinnacle of what science could achieve was best exemplified by the tale of the homunculus. 

Final Thoughts

If I haven’t lost you with the slightly disturbing tale of the homunculus, great. Thank you if you’re still with me. Now, there are lots of gaps in the historical records about Paracelsus and, because many of his ideas were so quickly adopted by many different people in different ways, it’s tricky sometimes to separate Paracelsus from Paracelsianism. That’s why I decided to make a separate text about Paracelsianism and digestion, which is coming out soon, to complement this one. For what is worth, I think Bruce Moran, who wrote a fantastic biography of Paracelsus, is right: we have to try to stick to the primary sources as much as we can, especially the texts written by Paracelsus himself. Even then, Paracelsus created a persona, and some stories do seem like exaggerations. Paracelsus’ life, works, and long-lasting influence are all incredibly complex topics, and I’ve only skimmed the surface here. There’s so much that could be said.

And that’s what’s so intriguing about Paracelsianism. It was such a patchwork, such a mix of traditions, that it was open to interpretation and to being reinvented in all kinds of ways. Just think of the anime I mentioned in the beginning, and the character ‘Hohenheim of Light’! The one thing that remained constant was a sort of anti-establishment rhetoric, and the importance given to chemical medicine – although, not everyone interested in iatrochemistry would have thought of themselves as a Paracelsian. We can roughly say that two kinds of Paracelsianisms developed after his death: one which took the cosmology and mysticism behind chemical medicine seriously, which was the model adopted by most of the royal courts who supported Paracelsianism, and another one which excluded this philosophical framework and consisted on the chemical drugs themselves. This more ‘popular’ kind of Paracelsianism was adopted by apothecaries and surgeons. It was this second kind that had the longest life. In the 19th and 20th centuries, English and German historians of medicine praised Paracelsus for his reformist ideas and his new chemical drugs, while dismissing his ideas about magic, astrology, and alchemy.

Paracelsus was a medical reformer, he rejected learned medicine in favour of empirical learning, he pushed the boundaries of experimentation – not only with the homunculus, but with poisons too, which I didn’t have the time to cover here -, he was instrumental in transforming medicine through chemistry, and he changed pharmaceutical practice by creating very specific remedies, rejecting holistic treatments. But we should be mindful not to focus exclusively on what now, in hindsight, may seem forward-looking. He was a man of his time, he took magic seriously, and it was a big part of his work: empiricism coexisted with mysticism, and Paracelsus didn’t see a contradiction in this. This dichotomy between rational and irrational, so characteristic of the 18th century and the Enlightenment, wouldn’t make sense for someone like him, living in the early modern period. And I think that’s why I’m personally so interested in the stories of people like him, and Leonardo Fioravanti. Besides being larger-than-life characters, full of incredible stories, they are also full of apparent contradictions; they make us rethink concepts, generalisations and strict divisions. They make things more complex and, I think, more interesting. Paracelsus was called everything from a genius to a Romantic hero, a rebel, a militant, and a pioneer of modern medicine, depending on who was writing the story. Paracelsus was even used by the N@zis as a nationalist idol.  But that’s a rabbit hole for another day. 

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Primary Sources:

Guinther von Andernach, De Medicine Veteri et Nova (1571).

Hieronymus Brunschwig, The Book on the Art of Distilling Simples (1500)

Hieronymus Brunschwig, The Book on the Art of Distilling Composite Remedies (1512). 

Paracelsus, Prophecy for the Next Twenty-Four Years (1536).

Paracelsus, Der grossen Wundartzney (1536).

Paracelsus, Seven Defenses of Paracelsus (against Those who Seek to Defame Me) (1994, original ca. 1530s).

(Pseudo-?)Paracelsus, De natura rerum (1572).

Anonymous, Aurora Thesaurusque Philosophorum Paracelsi… Preterea Anatomia Viva Paracelsi (1577)

Oswald Croll, Basilica Chymica (1609).

Peter Severinus, Idea Medicinae Philosophicae (1517).

Pharmacopoeia Londinensis (1618).

Further Reading:

Lawrence Conrad, Michael Neve, Vivian Nutton, Roy Porter, Andrew Wear, The Western Medical Tradition (1995).

Allen Debus, Man and Nature in the Renaissance (1978).

Karen Hunger Parshall, Michael T. Walton, Bruce T. Moran (eds.) Bridging Traditions: Alchemy, Chemistry, and Paracelsian Practices in the Early Modern Era (2015).

Julia Martins, ‘The Mother of All Things: Reshaping Medical Knowledge in Translation’, Epoch, March 2023. 

Bruce Moran, Distilling Knowledge: Alchemy, Chemistry, and the Scientific Revolution (2005).

Bruce Moran, Paracelsus: An Alchemical Life (2019).

Wolf-Dieter Müller-Jahncke, Astrologisch-magische Theorie und Praxis in der Heilkunde der frühen Neuzeit (1985).

Amadeo Murase (2020) ‘The Homunculus and the Paracelsian Liber de imaginibus‘, Ambix, 67:1, pp. 47-61.

William Newman, Promethean Ambitions: Alchemy and the Quest to Perfect Nature (2004).

____, ‘Bad Chemistry: Basilisks and Women in Paracelsus and pseudo-Paracelsus‘, Ambix. 2020 67(1), pp. 30-46.

William Newman and Anthony Grafton (eds.), Secrets of Nature: Astrology and Alchemy in Early Modern Europe (2001).

Katherine Park and Lorraine Daston (eds)., The Cambridge History of Science, vol. 3, Early Modern Science (2006).

Walter Pagel, Paracelsus: An Introduction to Philosophical Medicine in the Era of the Renaissance (1982).

Lawrence Principe, The Secrets of Alchemy (2013).

Lynn Thorndike, A History of Magic and Experimental Science, vols. 5–6 (1923–1958).

Charles Webster, From Paracelsus to Newton: Magic and the Making of Modern Science (1982).