The Man Whose Name Was A Poem

The man, a Swiss German, who bore the colorful and poetic name of Paracelsus Philippus Aureolus Theophrastus Bombastus von Hohenheim was born in 1493 in the village of Einsiedeln. Nine years later his family moved to Villach in southern Austria where his father worked as a physician. The boy received a solid humanistic and theological education and at the age of 16 he enrolled at the University of Basel to study medicine. Six years later he obtained his doctorate from the University of Ferrara in Italy. A physician, botanist, astrologer, alchemist and occultist, Dr. Paracelsus for a year held the position of chair of medicine at the University of Basel. But he was a difficult person and had a very independent mind. Paracelsus constantly criticized his colleagues, he attacked academic medicine, he organized public burning of textbooks, branding their authors as quacks and liars. Earning the reputation as a stubborn and arrogant slanderer, Paracelsus eventually had to leave Basel. And in 1530 the City of Nuremberg prohibited the printing of his works. Paracelsus became an itinerant physician. His wanderings took him through Germany, France, Spain and Hungary, and then through Scandinavia, Poland and Russia. Paracelsus was a pioneer of medicine. He applied chemicals and minerals in the treating of diseases. He is credited with first naming the element zinc and pioneering the use of laudanum, an opium tincture, which as a potent painkiller and caugh suppressant was widely used by physicians until the early 20th century. Paracelsus learned about the human body not only from books and observation but also by experimentation. Furthermore, he is credited as a founder of toxicology, a discipline concerned with the adverse effects of chemicals on living organisms. He stressed the doctrine of ‘dosis facit venenum’, the dose makes the poison, that is to say, a toxic substance is harmless in a small dose and, conversely, an ordinarily harmless substance can be deadly in a large dose. History has recorded among Paracelsus’ many accomplishments the systematic study of hydrotherapy, especially the therapeutic powers and value of the Alpine mineral springs. He had also contributed to the advancement of psychotherapy in being the first in the clinical mentioning of the unconscious. In the 20th century the psychoanalyst Carl Gustav Jung was profoundly influenced by Paracelsus' work and theorised that alchemic symbolism was an expression of the collective human unconscious. Paracelsus died in Salzburg in 1541, aged 47.