Paracelsus

The teaching

Taught from his own books, above all the Paragranum (1530), the Opus Paramirum (1531) and the Astronomia Magna.

The four pillars of medicine

Medicine, Paracelsus teaches in the Paragranum, stands on four pillars, and a physician who lacks any one of them is no physician. The first is philosophy, the knowledge of nature, of the earth and the water and of everything that grows and is made, for the physician grows out of nature and must learn from it, not from books alone. The second is astronomy, the knowledge of the heavens: the stars above, and the firmament within the human body that answers to them.

The third is alchemy, by which the physician prepares what nature has left unfinished, separating the pure from the impure and bringing each remedy to its full power. The fourth is the physician's own virtue, honesty, faithfulness and skill that stay with him until death, for a cheat or a boaster has no right to the sick. The deepest ground of medicine, he writes, is love.

The little world

A human being is the little world, holding in small everything the great world holds: the heavens with their stars, the earth, the waters and the air, the metals, the plants and the beasts. What the physician learns of the great world he finds again in the body, and what he has not learned outside he cannot understand within. So the cure of a disease is sought in the outer world, where its likeness grows, and a physician who knows only the body knows half of it.

Two lights and three bodies

There are two lights by which a person knows. The light of nature shows the things of nature, the arts and the sciences, the virtues of herbs and stones and the workings of the stars; the light of grace, the Holy Spirit, shows God and what belongs to eternal life. Both come from God, but the second stands above the first, and no learning in the light of nature may set itself against it.

In the Astronomia Magna the human being has a threefold make. The elemental body comes from the earth and returns to it. The sidereal body comes from the stars: it carries reason, skill and the arts, it teaches in sleep and in dreams, and it is what the hidden arts read, astrology, divination and natural magic among them. The soul comes from God and returns to God. Among the beings known in the light of nature are the peoples of the four elements, taught in full on the page of The elementals, under The spirit realm.

Five sources of sickness

Every disease, he teaches, comes from one of five sources, and the physician must know which. The first is the stars, which work on the body through the air it breathes. The second is poison, for every food and drink holds poison beside its nourishment, and the inner alchemist of the stomach must part the two. The third is the body's own nature, its make and its inner firmament. The fourth is the spirit, when one will acts on another and the spirit of one person harms the spirit of another. The fifth is God, who sends some sicknesses as a trial or a judgement, and these only God can lift.

To the five sources answer five kinds of physician: those who heal by the natures of things, setting contraries against contraries as the schools teach; those who heal by the specific virtues of remedies; those who heal by words and signs; those who heal by the power of the spirit; and those who heal by faith, as Christ and the apostles did.

Salt, sulphur, mercury and tartar

In the Opus Paramirum the four humours of the schools give way to his three principles, salt, sulphur and mercury, and a sickness is one of them out of its measure; the three are taught in full on the page of Salt, sulphur and mercury, under Alchemy. Among the diseases he names is the tartar. As wine leaves its tartar on the walls of the cask, so the body leaves a hard deposit from what it eats and drinks when it cannot part the pure from the impure, and from it come the stone, the gout and other hardenings.

Signatures and the dose

Nature marks every growth according to its virtue, he teaches, so that a skilled eye can read in the shape, the colour and the place of a plant what it is good for, as a face shows the character behind it. This is the art of signatures. Against the schools he prefers to treat like with like, and to seek for each disease the one remedy made for it, the arcanum, in minerals as well as in herbs.

Because the strongest remedies are poisons, he holds to his rule: all things are poison and nothing is without poison; only the dose makes a thing not a poison. The same rule is why no remedy of his is given here and none is to be copied. His medicines belong to the history of the art.

Nature heals the wound

In the Great Surgery he teaches that a wound is healed by nature and not by the surgeon. The body has within it a natural balsam that closes and mends what is cut, and the surgeon's work is to guard it: to keep the wound clean, to keep out whatever hinders it, and not to pour in oils or load it with salves and plasters that corrupt it. The surgeon is nature's servant and protector, never her master.

Reading nature from land to land

Learning, for Paracelsus, is gathered on the road. Scripture is studied letter by letter, he says, but nature from land to land: every country is a leaf of her book, and whoever would read it must walk its pages. By his own account he learned from barbers and bath keepers, from women and magicians, from alchemists and monks, from nobles and common folk as well as from doctors, and he taught his students to test every teaching by experience before they trusted it.