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Paracelsus (1493, Einsiedeln, Switzerland) – 1541, Salzburg, Austria) was the main author of the medical-pharmaceutical revolution of the Renaissance against the established thought of the 16th century.
His full name was Theophrastus Philippus Aureolus Bombastus von Hohenheim and he was the son of a country doctor. He received a humanistic education in religious centers. He studied at universities in Basel, Bologna, Vienna and Ferrara, where he earned his doctorate in medicine.
In Villach (Austria) he observed the way of working in iron mines and learned the principles of metallurgy and chemistry; He later increased this knowledge in the silver mines in Tyrol.
During his travels he came into contact with the town’s doctors, barber surgeons and healers. They were his true teachers, although he considered that the best possible teacher was Nature. As a doctor he prepared his medications himself.
Around 1526 he settled in Strasbourg. He was called to treat a serious ailment to the humanist J. Foebenius, the most famous editor of Basel. Foebenius, who was a personal friend of Erasmus, had been evicted by his doctors, who wanted to cut off his leg. Paracelsus cured him without having to go to those drastic extremes.
“You have saved Frobenius, who is half my life, from the world of shadows,” wrote Erasmus of Rotterdam in a letter to Paracelsus.
Under the protection of the scholar and reformer John Ecolampadio, Paracelsus obtained a professorship at the Faculty of Medicine in Basel in 1526, a city that was at that time one of the main centers of Renaissance humanism.
He warns his students that he “does not follow the classics; “He only believes in what he has discovered with his own strength and has verified with practice and experience.”
He traveled to Nuremberg, Baratzhausen and St. Gallen where he practiced medicine simply, he continued to teach his classes in inns or taverns, where people from all social classes listened to them, while at the same time he wrote his works.
In the last stage of his life he became a lay preacher and traveled through Tyrol, Bavaria and Bohemia, dying in 1541 in the Salzburg hospital due to liver cancer.
As a philosopher, he was a follower of Neoplatonism, Hippocrates, Lullio, and Vilanova.
As a doctor, he devised a practical treatment for the healing of chronic wounds and ulcers, so widespread at that time; he studied the diseases of miners; He identified tuberculosis and silicosis as occupational diseases and was the first to recognize the congenital form of syphilis.
He administered to his patients those medications that experience had taught him were useful against the illness they suffered.
He was an absolute supporter of chemical medicines, which until then had hardly been used. He established the foundations of Yatrochemistry. He practiced comprehensive medicine, in which he did not admit the separation between doctor-surgeon-pharmacist, consequently demanding from anyone who dedicated himself to it absolute personal knowledge of everything necessary to cure the disease, and he accepted, as the main weapon to fight against the disease, to the medicine, which the doctor had to know how to look for, prepare and use. He was above all a therapist, who dedicated his best works to the study of medicine.
As he explained in his Paragranum, Paracelsus’s medicine was supported by four columns:
Thus he accepted five causes of disease (ens):
All his life he considered that the purpose of medicine was love for one’s neighbor and that serving the people was the doctor’s mission, instilling in his students that the first thing for a doctor should always be his patients and that, in order to dedicate himself to curing them, The basis of their knowledge would always be found where God had placed it: in Nature.
