My Beef With Paracelsus
Not Nearly as Revolutionary as he Thought He Was
Every time I hear the name of Parcelsus, I hiss and do that cat thing where the hairs on the back of my neck lift and my claws come out. I loathe that toad.
Why? Oh, I will tell you why.
Who He Was
Born Theophrastus Von Hohenheim in around 1493, he got a doctorate in medicine from the University of Ferrera in Vienna.
He became a city doctor in Salzburg, buying citizenship and then kicking up a hornet’s nest by criticizing his peers. They got sick of his noise, and he had to flee the city. He kept on badmouthing his fellow apothecaries and prescribing metals as medicine.
Then he burnt the works of Celsus and my boy Galen, like a puffed-up clown performing in the circus.
Why I Want To Go Back In Time and Kick Him
He’s the classic example of a ‘genius.’ He gets all kinds of praise mostly for picking a fight with others .
His revolution was limited: other people were using metals in their medicine before him. Arsenic is a heavy metal, and it was already part of most apothecaries.
He made the pithy phrase “the dose makes the poison” but the idea, that taking small doses of something can cure you when large doses could kill you, was often ignored because he was a raging arrogant jerk.
His ‘revolutionary’ new medicine was more imbalances, only of salt, mercury, and sulfur, and he wanted to treat people with talismans and astrology.
And for this B.S he calls himself ‘better than Celsus.’
He is not.
And ‘emphasizes observation,’ when he burns Galen’s work? Hello, who did actual autopsies that give us a lot of our knowledge? That’s right: Galen. Everybody needs to acknowledge that we are indebted to Galen and his work on gladiators. Emphasizes observation, in the 1500's? Aristotle already made his comeback in the West in the 1200’s, and there were many observers by this time, but who puffs himself up like a peacock? Paracelsus.
I hate this stuffed-shirt because he is the archetypal ‘maverick doctor,’ putting on airs and badmouthing most doctors as though he wasn’t, in fact, a conventional, run-of-the-mill doctor of the 1500’s. The only thing he was right about was the dose-response, which is really the only thing that puts him ahead of some other alt-medders who are wrong about everything.
I hate a self-important self-aggrandizer SO much. Fie on him and his poisons!
Sources:
Sawbones: Paracelsus, aired January 27, 2015