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'Decay is the beginning of all birth'

By P.D. Smith
THE GUARDIAN, LONDON
Sunday, Feb 05, 2006, Page 18

The Devil's Doctor: Paracelsus and the World of Renaissance Magic and Science By Philip Ball 435 pages Heinmann

One day in 1527, Paracelsus let it be known that he would reveal the greatest secret of medicine to the inhabitants of Basle. The esteemed doctors and academics of the university, dressed in their rich robes and fur hats, gathered to hear his words of wisdom. Secretly they hoped the roving physician and alchemist would make a fool of himself -- already they could feel the warm glow of Schadenfreude.

In his hands he bore the great secret -- a dish which he held aloft for all the learned company to see. It contained "steaming human excrement." As the outraged audience hurried away in disgust, Paracelsus's words echoed after them: "If you will not hear the mysteries of putrefactive fermentation, you are unworthy of the name of physicians!"

He did indeed believe that the essential truth of alchemy was expressed in the axiom "decay is the beginning of all birth."

Confronting his enemies with "a bowl of shit" carried a less esoteric but equally eloquent message.

This memorable anecdote is told by Philip Ball in his wonderfully rich biography, and it is revealing of both Paracelsus's character and his ideas. His stay in Basle had started out well. Many students had attended his unofficial courses. He told them that doctors didn't need "eloquence or knowledge of language and books," but "profound knowledge of Nature and her works."

But wherever he lived, it was not long before this fiery iconoclast began ruffling feathers. According to Carl Jung, "Paracelsus was a little too sure that he had his enemy in front of him, and did not notice that it was lodged in his own bosom."

To his enemies, Paracelsus was the "forest-ass of Einsiedeln." Theophrastus Bombast von Hohenheim was born in 1493 in Einsiedeln, Switzerland, and died in Salzburg in 1541. Afterwards the rumor persisted that he had risen from the dead. His father had been a physician from Swabia in Germany. Theophrastus's experiences at universities such as Freiburg and Heidelberg taught him that he was not born to live in an ivory tower. How is it, he asked, that "the higher colleges managed to produce so many high asses?"

Medicine in the early Renai-ssance had advanced little since Roman times. For instance, physi-cians did not think it necessary to examine patients, relying instead on a urine sample for diagnosis.

"All they can do is to gaze at piss," said Paracelsus scornfully. He accused them of "villainy and knavery" and said that if people realized how they were being deceived, medics would be stoned in the street. They, in turn, accused him of drunkenness.

His written works, most of which were only published posthumously, could be "para-noid, repetitive, vain and self-aggrandising." But beneath the bluster and posturing were genuine insights.

Paracelsus turned his back on Aristotle and Galen and embraced experience as his mentor. He taught that "every land is a leaf of the Codex of Nature, and he who would explore her must tread her books with his feet." Paracelsus brought "a new, questing spirit" to natural philosophy. He investi-gated the plague at considerable risk to himself, devised a "chemical diagnosis of madness" and, although celibate, wrote about "the diseases of women" at a time when medics turned a blind eye to their suffering.

This militant medic, whom his opponents accused of being "the Luther of physicians" engaged in a life-long battle against academic doctors who learnt their medicine from dusty tomes rather than practical experience. His book of medical alchemy, Archidoxa ("Arch-Wisdom"), is a "physician's cookbook of remedies". In it he moves towards modern chemotherapy, using chemicals to treat illness rather than attempting to rebalance the body's humors according to ancient and defunct Galenic principles.

For Paracelsus, alchemy was not merely about the creation of gold, but was a medical and mystical philosophy that explained the functioning of the body (the transformation of food into flesh, blood and excrement) as well as the more general principles that revealed the mysteries of the earth.

He was an intellectual vagabond: a pacifist who always carried a great broadsword by his side, even in bed, and a footloose intellectual who traveled from Ireland to Moscow, and from Algiers to Uppsala.

Yet writers from Blake to Borges have been captivated by his words, and he has become "a cipher for arcane and occult knowledge."

Ball succeeds in convincing us that, despite his arcane ideas, his vision of the "strangeness and the beauty of the magical universe" remains both inspiring and important. As Paracelsus himself wrote, "it is a divine gift to investigate in the light of Nature."
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