Learn to Heal Thyself (43)
Paracelsus (1493-1541) making fun of bad old ideas and experimenting with new ones so as to avoid becoming a corpse
Aureolus Theophrastus Bombastus von Hohenheim [Paracelsus], jolting people out of age-old nonsensical medical treatment. Reproduction, 1927, of etching by A. Hirschvogel, 1538.
From Paracelsus we learn of existential savvy that healing outcome can be determined by experiment. That nature should be allowed to participate in healing, that the dose makes the poison, and that keeping an antiseptic stance is a good bet to avoid becoming a corpse.
“Down to earth Paracelsus” donned the dirty apron of the alchemist and lectured off-campus about hygiene and the healing power of inorganics. His fame spread when he used new experience to save the leg of an influential man. He was a prophet of the science to come in that he acted on experimental evidence, standing in the way of a medicine of the time that too often listened to authoritarian opinion and so produced corpses, instead of healing, when given free reign.
Paracelsus was an intriguing person, off center but brilliant. His middle name migrated to the English language as "bombastic," meaning pompous and pretentious (it derives from Latin bombax "cotton"). But down to earth, or truthful would be more accurate for him.
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Short shout
There was a time when I considered Paracelsus, the off the middle physician of old, to be a possible candidate for the first scientist of the West. He experimented with remedies, chose the ones that worked best, and cursed the ones that led to corpses. And he wasn’t beholden to anybody. Is there a better definition for what science could be? Perhaps I now would expect a yet more fundamental quest for this title of first, a new phenomenology and its math explained. But he is somebody to behold!
First science stirrings in the West
You may have found that my tendency to delegate medieval times to the dustbin of history is perhaps too extreme. But there simply was no equivalent of fundamental science reminding of Alexandria or its further tradition in the Golden Islamic Age. We just can’t teach medieval science of the West, because there is none to speak of. Instead, when disease struck, there was theology galore and souls saved, while bodies were transformed to corpses. It can produce a literature of woe and a religion of suffering but no lecture on science.
Eventually, there were though early stirrings also in Europe, and a rather effective one in terms of its spirit was happening with the traveling physician Paracelsus. By spirit I here mean one of rebelling against inert tradition based on authority and revelation. Paracelsus placed experiment in its way. Over the long haul, this led to a deep change in medical thinking. Isn’t it surprising that such a complex subject as medicine was one of the first to yield tangible results in terms of the benefits of experimentation and experience?
Life
Paracelsus (1493-1541) was born near Zürich. His father, the natural son of a prince, was himself a physician.
Paracelsus’ name indicates stepping beyond the Roman medical-authority Celsus. Paracelsus did this by trying out inorganic materials for the healing of disease. He experimented with mercury salts for syphilis, and it worked. Wounds could be sterilized, the production of corpses reduced. With this revolutionary attitude, calling himself Bombastus, he challenged the truly bombastic and asphyxiating hold of Roman antiquity’s authority. One of their teachings was that organics had to be treated with organics. So, the wound is dressed in manure, and as sepsis spreads, a corpse is produced. A priest saves the soul with a last ointment and leads it to the grave to be resurrected at a later date. This world had its own wisdom and stability, but a new world was to supplant it. Why? Because the new world had faster kinetics, fewer corpses and more life.
We see here two principles at work simultaneously. One is the hypothesis or concept of “organic with organic” that was needlessly limiting and often outright dangerous. The other principle relates to the trials with new materials such as mercury salts. You run the experiment and you find out. It was easy to work with inorganics, as they could be reasonably uniformly synthesized. But did his spaghetti stick to the wall, so to say? Absolutely. Mercury salts do their beneficial work to this day, even as one has to be careful with toxicity.
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The concept of antisepsis
Paracelsus’ work Die große Wundarzney is a forerunner of the concept of antisepsis. He gained his empirical knowledge from his personal experiences as an army physician in the Venetian wars. These wars produced a lot of corpses in their gruesomeness, and it often didn’t help when medicine tried to save some. But these were the formative years when Paracelsus experienced bad medical practices and learned from his experience of how to avoid producing corpses, setting his life on track for that task. He may have received his calling then in the bleak sceneries of war.
Paracelsus demanded that wounds be kept clean, stating, "If you prevent infection, Nature will heal the wound all by herself." He had seen that it worked better. During this time as a military surgeon, Paracelsus was horrified by the crudity of medical knowledge. Doctors then assumed that infection was a natural part of the healing process and suggested sewing or plastering wounds.
And so, in his extended travels throughout Europe, Paracelsus made light of the now preposterous looking techniques of wound dressing with such organic things as animal feces and feathers. In fact, his style of persiflage of the old school, combined with his success with new approaches of experimenting and collecting experiences heralds, more so than perhaps many others, the new direction. There arose a new intellectual atmosphere and he was unfolded with it and came to bloom. The winds of truth and honesty had started to blow, and he helped them blowing along.
Paracelsus’ Paragranum (against the grain) of 1530 and Paramirum (against miracles) condensed experiences as a medical doctor still occupied with alchemy and the gods Thoth or Hermes. He believed that: “the quantity makes the poison” or “Dreams must be heeded and accepted. For a great many of them come true.” His was a time in transition. But when he healed the infected leg of the influential printer Froebenius with an inorganic, so that it didn’t have to come off, he had become famous and wealthy overnight.
Lecturing outside of campus
With 33 at Basel, Paracelsus had the opportunity of a professorial life. And some would say: he wasted it. He observed no formalities; he neither registered nor made courtesy calls to his colleagues. Instead, he published his famous program including his famous formula of “experimentum and ratocinium”: we shall not adhere to the rules of the ancients but study nature and use experience gained in our own years of practice. What a doctor needs is not eloquence but a profound knowledge of nature. Come with a good will to reform medicine.
With this approach it was no wonder that Paracelsus had to lecture outside of campus. Yet his venue was filled, perhaps not with the classical student types but with a motley of alchemists, barbers and others without academic background. He came initially in professorial garb but in a grand gesture ripped it off and continued teaching in the sooty apron of an alchemist. Only the Greek Hippocrates was treated in a conventional reverent way by him.
Paracelsus spoke in Latin as translated by his secretary Oporinus, who did not speak that well of him after his death though: “I shall not desire to live again with such a man.” While Oporinus grants miraculous cures, he initially does not notice any scholarship or piety in Paracelsus. While he does not find Paracelsus sober for more than an hour, he grants that his dictations late at night were coherent and logical. He finds him a spendthrift often without a penny in his pockets. Yet miraculously his purse would be full the next day. Paracelsus did not care for women and initially, up to his 25th year, neither for alcohol. The latter changed though dramatically. Now in his later years he would drink a full inn of peasants under the table.
Oporinus later regretted a negative letter about Paracelsus when a remarkable revival of respect took place a few years after his death.
Paracelsus combined traditions that were at once magical and empirical, scholarly, and folk, or learned and artisanal. He read ancient texts and then burned them, but he also believed devoutly in a female deity and an intriguing concept of creation. Learning through his travels he fashioned a new form of medicine based on the experience of miners, alchemists, midwives, and barber-surgeons. He introduced changes in the way the body was understood, how disease was defined, and how treatments were to be fashioned. At the same time, he was impressed by mystical speculations of an alchemical view of nature.
There is a fascinating exhibit on Paracelsus in the old circular tower in Vienna’s old medical school (Pathologisch-Anatomische Sammlungen), the one famous from the film Amadeus as a madhouse. It was to house the composer Salieri in his last disorienting years.
Black art
I am not sure I understand to what degree Paracelsus believed in his own black magic. There is no question that he pursued it with vigor and that would question much of his valuable work. But for important decision he had his own proven methods at hand, making me think that he practiced magic for easy income without believing in it. I will here give a brief sampling of what I call his black art.
Paracelsus took the human body as an analogy to the solar system in the sense of a connection between the seven organs of the body and the seven planets. In his practice of medicine both astrology and the magnet entered. His first care of a patient was to consult the planets. There he thought the disease had its origin, and if the patient was a woman, he took it for granted that the cause of her malady lay in the moon. He anticipated the philosophy of Descartes by considering that by bringing the various elements of the human body into harmony with the elements of nature—fire, light, earth—old age, and death might be indefinitely postponed. These are not maxims we subscribe to today.
Yet Paracelsus’ experimented in the extraction of essential spirits from plants and metals. Such an extract from the poppy resulted in the production of laudanum (a popular form of opium through the nineteenth century). He prescribed it freely in the form of "three black pills." Similarly, Paracelsus learned to extract the "predestined element" of plants that ranked yet higher in the vegetable aristocracy. Thus, he gained the "first life" of the gilly-flower, the cinnamon, the myrrh, the scammony, or the celandine. There was some usefulness in these elixirs.
Quotes
Here is Paracelsus’ perhaps most known citation in full theatricality: “What is there that is not poison? All things are poison and nothing is without poison. Solely the dose determines that a thing is not a poison.”
Paracelsus was not the epitome of a likable person. On the more questionable side of his character, he is reported as unpredictable and stubborn. His strong points were that he was well-educated and deeply religious. What made him into a genius appears to have been his free-thinking as an independent iconoclast. We praise him when he demanded that physicians should rely on facts and not on authority alone. But in doing so he gained a reputation for being arrogant. As he said: “My accusers complain that I have not entered the temple of knowledge through the right door. But which one is the truly legitimate door - Galen and Avicenna, or Nature? I have entered through the door of Nature. Her light, not the lamp of an apothecary’s shop, has illuminated my way.” “I am different, let this not upset you.” He deals with his being different with pride and sayings like: “Be not another, if you can be yourself.”
His work The Third Defense and his famous statement on poisons was written in 1538. It was not published until 1564 though, more than 20 years after his death. Thus, it was only during later times and centuries that the most visionary of his writings became appreciated. Paracelsus’ ingenuity was his emphasis that lower doses – below a threshold – could cause otherwise poisonous substances to become harmless or even healing.
Here are some sayings about the part humans play in the larger frame of things: “Man is a microcosm, or a little world, because he is an extract from all the stars and planets of the whole firmament, from the earth and the elements; and so he is their quintessence.”
“...all our nourishment becomes ourselves; we eat ourselves into being... For every bite we take contains in itself all our organs, all that is included in the whole man, all of which he is constituted... We do not eat bone, blood vessels, ligaments, and seldom brain, heart, and entrails, nor fat, therefore bone does not make bone, nor brain make brain, but every bite contains all these. Bread is blood, but who sees it? It is fat, who sees it? ...for the master craftsman in the stomach is good. He can make iron out of brimstone: he is there daily and shapes the man according to his form.”
The “dancing plague of Strasbourg”
Paracelsus also gave us an intriguing account of what we now consider a psychogenic illness not unusual for the time of Tall Tales: the “dancing plague of Strasbourg” that began in a particularly hot mid-July 1518. Accordingly, a lone woman stepped outside her house, jigging for several days and inducing dozens more to the same irresistible urge. One writer, Sebastian Brant, had devoted a chapter of his self-righteous bestseller, Ship of Fools, to the folly of dance. He, his fellow city councilors and local doctors declared the dancing to be the result of “overheated blood” on the brain to be quenched by, you wouldn’t believe it: a prescription of more dancing. Venues were cleared, and stages were erected, one next to the horse fair. To these locations they escorted the crazed dancers. The belief was that by frantic motion they would shake off their sickness. Pipers and drummers were hired. “Strong men” kept the whirling and swaying dancers upright. It looked like a scene imagined by the absurdist painter Hieronymous Bosch. A poem describes what happened in essence: “In their madness people kept up their dancing until they fell unconscious, and many died.”
Eventually the council realized to have made a mistake and that the dancers were suffering from what they thought was holy wrath. Dancers thought they had to atone for their sins. Now the dancers were taken to a shrine dedicated to St Vitus. There their bloodied feet were stuck into red shoes upon which most ceased their wild movements.
The dancing craze would turn out to be the last in a century’s tradition, erupting especially near the river Rhine. It represented a classic case of “spirit possession”. Accordingly, normal consciousness is disabled, and people enter a dissociated mental state. In an “environment of belief” people then act according to culturally prescribed ideas of how the possessed should behave. With the new wind of reason, the craze declined along with the belief system that had sustained it. The dancing craze can be seen as the opposite stance to science, in a way similar to witch hunting. Its coming to an end with the rise of reason, at least temporarily and in the specified guises, is a significant happening.
A healer’s death
Paracelsus had lost some luster in his later life. Eventually, he couldn’t heal himself of problems with alcohol and money, and so we must leave him in his own predicament.
Paracelsus died in nebulous circumstances in Salzburg in 1541, where he sports a bombastic grave at Sebastian cemetery of the Sebastian church. This church was built around 1500 as one of the few surviving churches that were present in Paracelsus’ time (there were later Baroque additions). True to form this was initially a cemetery for plague victims, although his bones were transferred later, the few meters to the present up-scale location, with much written ado about his healing prowess.
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Paracelsus followed the deep wisdom of the ancient Greek Hippocrates that our nature has reservoirs of healing itself. He arrived at it by observation. One has just to avoid the stupidity of the menders of Roman gladiators concerning hygiene.
I am just in the process of hoping for this self-healing as my wife had a hip fracture (upper femur) yesterday on walking the dog.
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Hi Hans, Sorry to hear about Kate. I hope surgery goes well and she heals quickly. Please give her my best.
Thanks for the essay on Paracelsus. I admit to having never heard of him. Funny that he made "elixirs". This seems to have been a common approach around the world. And, it seems like much has not changed! Coffee, kambucha... ok, these aren't as complex as Paracelsus' elixirs, or those made by the Tang Dynasty poet Li Po. Great that Paracelsus saw that wounds needed to be kept clean.
K has weak spells and will stay some more in rehab. I drown my sorrow in playing with AI, so that I can tell her uplifting funny stories about it, eg Dalton with calculator. Soon she will not understand those either.