The Caretaker
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Paracelsus - 25/may/2023
🕑 Added 2023-05-25 16:27:14 +0000 UTCPARACELSUS
Sometimes, good ideas need a bastard. Alchemist, doctor, lay-theologian, and grandfather of toxicology, Phillipus Aruelious Theophrastus Bombastus von Hoenhiem –better known as Paracelsus– was a preeminent shit-talker in a Europe that already contained Martin Luther. He was the five-foot-nothing, always-armed-with-a-sword bastard who would draw from alchemy and magic to lay the groundwork for modern medicine.
PARACELSUS THE DOCTOR
Welcome to the year 1530. You are a doctor in the city of Nuremberg. A sick person comes to you, and asks for healing. The first thing you would do is consult your advanced, cutting edge medical textbooks. You’re a pretty wealthy and successful doctor, so you’ve got all three books: Galen, Hippocrates, and Avicenna. You, like your other respected contemporaries, are a humorist. Meaning, you understand that all bodies have a unique balance of four substances called humors. Blood, Phlegm, Black Bile, and Yellow Bile. If this person is sick, it means that their humors have become unbalanced in some way. Your job is to balance them again.
The first thing you would do is determine what type of illness they have. Is it hot or cold? Is it dry or wet? Their forehead is warm to the touch, and their nose is running. Bingo, this is a hot, wet illness. You’ve studied quite a bit, so you know which herbs are good, and which herbs are bad. You need to prescribe them cold, dry herbs. You write them a prescription with dozens of ingredients. After all, the more different types of cold herbs in the medicine, the more effective it will be. Your patient will take that prescription to an apothecary, who will assemble the medicine for a price.
Someone comes to you with a huge infected wound on their leg. It needs to be amputated. You are insulted that they came to you. You’re not some lowly surgeon. Surgeons are glorified butchers, people who saw off limbs on battlefields. Maybe some surgeons have the good sense to learn anatomy at a university, but even then, they don’t garner anywhere near the respect that you do as a doctor.
Paracelsus thinks you’re an idiot. He hates your guts, and he tells you to your face every time he sees you. He calls himself Theophrastus, which is like calling yourself “Einstein 2.” Instead of Theophrastus, you and your other doctor friends call him Cacophrastus, literally “shit-fence.” But what really pisses you off is that, unfortunately, he is a better doctor than you and most of your friends.
[include the humor chart]
PARACELSUS THE MAGE
Paracelsus was a man who believed that wisdom can come from anywhere. He was a doctor, but he was also an Alchemist, an Astral magician, and a Hermetic Mage. By the time he had established his practice in Strasbourg in 1526 he had already traveled Europe, learning medical techniques from military surgeons, barbers, bathers, village women, alchemists, monks and those regarded as magicians. [1, 29]
Medical knowledge at the time held that some substances were good, and others were bad. In practice, this led to medicines prescribed in poisonous doses. The logic being that if two aspirin is good for a headache, then two thousand aspirin will make you immune to headaches for the rest of your life. Paracelsus thought this was nonsense. He railed against apothecaries, saying “the poison makes the dose” thereby inventing the field of toxicology.
But Paracelsus didn’t pull this out of thin air. Paracelsus’s medical theories are a direct result of his interest in the recently-translated alchemical works of Hermes Trismegistus. (Thank you Marsillio Ficinio) The paracelsian body is a hermetic microcosm, a small system governed by the same rules as the greater universe. Just as alchemists could use alchemy to chemically “distill” precious metals from ore, Paracelsus believed that a doctor should be able to distill the helpful essences from a substance, creating a more effective, pure medicine.
Paracelsus made significant contributions to alchemy, but chief among them was the Sulphur-Mercury-Salt theory. First mentioned in his 1530 work Opus Paramirum, Paracelsus explained his theory thus:
PARACELSUS THE ALCHEMIST
Gimme like 5 pages max. Im at p 90
[who is paracelsus]
- Anti-Galen, bit of a brag. Said that he was the best doctor ever
- Deeply spiritual person
- United alchemy and medicine by treating the body as a microcosm
- Invented laudanaum
- SHIT. TALKER.
- Introduced sulphur-mercury-salt
[medicine before P]
- Humor Theory
- Surgeons and Diagnosticians were different people.
- P needed to re-define disease
- Proposed that clouds of poison were created though astral misalignments. Everything contains that which both nurtures and poisons. The key is balance.
- Hated Apothecaries. Most medicines at the time contained like 40-60 ingredients. The idea being that if you had a hot-wet illness, you needed as many cold-dry ingreidents as possible.
- Paracelsus said that literally anything in nature was poison if you prepared it improperly.
“Theophrastus von Hohenheim, later called Paracelsus,was probably less than 1.5 metres tall (5 feet), and by comparison, the sword he carried must have seemed enormous. Rumour had it that he kept a medicine in the sword’s pommel capable of curing almost anything. Why not? The Renaissance world was one of wonders and marvels, a world in which the old and trusted mixed with the new and unexpected.”[1]
Certainly he took patients and treated them on the
basis of techniques linked both to traditional medicine and to
those he had encountered during his journeys, to the learning
and procedures of military surgeons, barbers, bathers, village
women, alchemists, monks and those regarded as magicians.[1, 29]
Make your way to Basel, he announced, if you want to learn
true medicine (illus. 5).[1, 30]
[1, 34] Paracelsus burning books
“Oddly, Paracelsus and Galen agreed on this point. Art
perfected nature and refined those who acquired knowledge
of her secrets.” [1, 37]
How did a physician gain improvement? In perfecting the art of medicine through reading the book of Nature, how was ‘reading’ to be done? The first and most important book to read was the book of wisdom. Since everything in nature comes from God, including medicine, one needed to seek medical knowledge first through prayer. ‘This’, Paracelsus instructed, ‘is the [proper] path to school.’11 [1, 38]
He conceived of the body as a microcosm of the greater design.
Alchemy is that which completes that which has not come to its end . . . As there are alchemists of metals . . . who separate the impure from the pure by means of the fire . . . there are also alchemists of medicine who separate what belongs to a medicine from what does not. So you see what kind of art alchemy is. It is the art of removing the useless from the useful and bringing a thing to its final being and material end [1, 40]
Paracelsus also rejected the notion that all things in the immediate physical world were composed of earth, air, fire and water. In his view, there was something that preceded even them: the cosmolog- ical wombs, as he called them, of Sulphur, Salt and Mercury. These were known as the ‘first three’ (tria prima); they pro- duced each body, sensitive as well as insensitive, metals and minerals, as well as herbs, plants, animals and people. [42]
He had been called the ‘Luther of physicians’ and knew that the same crowd hated him as they hated the religious reformer, wishing for them both the punishment of eternal fire. [1, 51]
Studying the heavens meant studying their influences, and the celestial powers that connected the human body to the heavenly bodies Paracelsus called astra. [1,52]
Disease, in other words, was not something outside nature, not some other order of thing, nor was it nature gone wrong. Disease was part of nature, part of the intelligence of nature; it was
that part of nature that knows how things should be when things fall apart, as everything must. Disease is the intelligence by which the body knows to be sick, to fall apart a little or a lot, in one way rather than another. [1, 53]
Paracelsus says there’s three types of disease: Disease from unbalanced humors, Disease from words and emotions, and Disease directly from god. All have different levels of treatabilioty.
Nothing in nature was without poison, Paracelsus ex-
plained, but by means of alchemy, human artistry separated
away what was harmful and impure and delivered to the body
what was pure and healthful. [1, 77] He points out taht dogs and cats can eat the same thing, and itmight kill one of them
Alchemical techniques involve purification of heat. Paracelsus was accusing apothecaries of essentially giving people raw ingredients, with all the dirt and poison still included.
Nature herself was, in her divine origin, a giant
pharmacopoeia in which each part (plants, animals or min-
erals) was created for the alchemist to treat specific illnesses
in the body. The alchemist–physician knew which part of
nature to use to treat specific parts of the body because each
plant, animal or mineral was ‘signed’ – we might better say de-
signed – by God for its intended purpose. [1, 80]
These doctrines of signs and signatures and microcosms were not new. They’re hermetic. And we have our good buddy Marsillio Ficino to thank for that!
Paracelsus was certainly aware of the so-called ‘Hermetic
tradition’ and, as we will see a little later, viewed magic as a
feature of the spirit-packed world in which he lived. [1, 82]
Finding correspondences in nature was part of that tradition, but
Paracelsus added a special twist – not entirely original, but a
trademark nevertheless. This was the idea that in defining
the relationships between medicines and disease, God had
designed local substances which, when properly prepared,
would effectively treat local illnesses.
SOURCES:
[1]Paracelcus, an Alchemical Life, Bruce T. Moran
[2]Paracelsus, Essential Theoretical Writings, Brill.
[3]Paracelsian Moments, Ed. Metzner
[4] Hanegraaf dictionary, Paracelsus starts at 922
