The Devil's Doctor: Paracelsus and the World of Renaissance Magic and Science

Features

• Cover Type: Hard Cover with 448 pages
• Published by: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
• Edition: 1st Edition April 18, 2006
• Written in: English
• ISBN 10 Number: 0374229791
• ISBN 13 Number: 978-0374229795
• Book Dimensions: 9.4 x 6.3 x 1.8 inches
• Weighs: 1.8 pounds

From Publishers Weekly
Starred Review. If one really wants to understand the contradictions and "intellectual ferment" of the 16th century, says Ball, one should look not at Luther or Copernicus, but at the much-maligned Paracelsus. Born in Switzerland in 1493, Philip Theophrastus Bombastus von Hohenheim, aka Paracelsus, is a figure often more imagined than known. Famous as a doctor of alchemic medicine, he has been compared with Faust and developed a reputation as a miracle worker and charlatan that only grew after his death in 1543. Ball, author of the prize-winning Critical Mass, mixes scant biographical detail with a wide-ranging evocation of the Renaissance worldview to create a fascinating portrait of the man, his age and his historical reputation. Forays into ancient, medieval and Islamic medicine, academic rivalries, the proliferation of publications, and treatments of syphilis all help to recreate the mindset in which doctor and patient lived. Concepts of magic as simply the hidden qualities of nature, and the blurring of poison and medicine demonstrate how what we call science and magic overlapped. Ball produces a vibrant, original portrait of a man of contradictions: "[a] humble braggart, a puerile sage, an invincible loser, a courageous coward, a pious heretic, an honest charlatan." 50 black and white illus. (Apr.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From The Washington Post
Among scientists and historians of science, it is common to see the so-called pseudo- sciences of old, such as alchemy and astrology, as the faltering precursors of the empirical science of today. According to this model, scientific endeavor has gradually been purified of its superstitious and religious encumbrances to emerge as the objective disciplines we now rely on and revere.

As a result, the word "occult" has a terrible rap. But as Philip Ball points out in his knowledgeable new biography, many of the scientific ideas we accept today as facts are occult (meaning "hidden") "in the Renaissance sense" -- phenomena like gravity and electromagnetic fields, even though these are "no less occult than the astrological 'emanations' of a star."

Renaissance magic and science can be as baffling as a labyrinth in part because high magic, religion and science shared much common ground. Our own worldview finds that unified vision difficult to grasp. In a factual sense, at least, Ball demonstrates an exuberant command of the field. The Devil's Doctor, his life of Paracelsus, the innovative Renaissance magus, is very much a life in context. We learn about early mining technology, the history of chemistry, Renaissance education, metallurgy, alchemy, medicine, Neoplatonic and Hermetic doctrine, the traditions of Arabic science, the life of a military surgeon and the internecine warfare of the Italian city-states. We get miniature histories of cobalt and zinc and a beguiling account of the etymology of the word "alcohol." As for the amazing wanderings of Paracelsus himself, Ball tracks him with satellite-like precision all over the known world. To do this, you have to know the geography and history of the period inside out.

His hero is worth it. Born about 1493 near Einsiedeln, Switzerland, Philip Theophrastus Aureolus Bombast von Hohenheim -- also known as Paracelsus (meaning, "beyond Celsus," a prominent Roman doctor) -- was the son of an alchemist and physician who taught at a mining school. The verifiable details of his life are scant, but he seems to have grown up poor, was tutored by his father, educated at monastic schools, and studied medicine and chemistry at the universities of Tübingen, Ferrara and Vienna. As an army surgeon he also saw the world, serving throughout Europe, Russia and the Levant.

In 1527, he accepted the post of town doctor at Basel, and his reputation was quickly made when he saved the life of the famed publisher Johann Froben, whom local university physicians had given up for lost. Predictably, the town's medical establishment tried to marginalize him, but his lectures, based on experience rather than the authority of ancient texts, attracted large crowds. After being expelled as a troublemaker from Basel, he spent the remainder of his life on the move. Few of his voluminous writings were published during his lifetime, but his collected works, on topics ranging from astrology to the Virgin Mary, fill ten quarto volumes. He died in Salzburg in 1541.

He was quite a character, quarrelsome and defiant, with eccentricities galore, and his scorn for the medical establishment was fierce. "In the most distant corner [of the world]," he once declared, "there will not be one of you on whom the dogs will not piss." As a natural philosopher, he accepted the four elements of Aristotle but postulated three principles -- sulfur, mercury and salt -- that by their nature command the form everything in the world assumes. By active principles, he meant something akin to essences or Platonic ideas. His medical remedies were thereby linked to "magic" in the highest sense.

At the same time, he was a practical pioneer. In surgery, he sensibly advocated "minimal intervention" such as "keeping the wound clean"; was the first to advocate chemotherapy (the use of chemical drugs); treated (successfully at times) syphilis, the plague, paralysis and chronic ulcers; recognized suicidal depression, obsession and hysterical blindness as forms of mental illness; linked the respiratory ailments of miners to their industrial environment; and insisted on the chemical examination of urine to diagnose disease. He also understood that in administering remedies (mercury for syphilis, for example) more was often less: "The physician must remember that his medicines do not actually cure in themselves; rather, they create the conditions that allow the body to heal itself." His greatest modern advance was to hypothesize independent pathogens as agents of disease, instead of ascribing sickness to an imbalance in the patients themselves.

His devotion to alchemy -- "purification by separation" with an inner meaning of self-transformation -- was also intimately connected to his medical research. In his view, alchemy was exemplified by the digestive system, which "knows how to make our flesh from what is good in food while rejecting what is bad." If the alchemy of digestion could "turn barley and turnips into flesh and blood, what might not be possible" in the alchemical lab?

Ball is a science writer of unusual curiosity and range -- his previous books include Bright Earth: Art and the Invention of Color and Life's Matrix: A Biography of Water -- but now and then the reader must tread with care. He suggests that astrology was ultimately subverted by close observation of the heavens -- in particular, by the recognition that comets reappear after predictable intervals. But the predictable recurrence of celestial events is one thing astrologers had no trouble accommodating to their divinatory schemes. Ball's secular bias also scants anything having to do with religious belief. Just as high magic can be seen as "a necessary self-delusion," so the belief in an all-knowing God who created an intelligible universe, he tells us, is related to an infantile impulse and "a way of rendering significance to human existence, and perhaps every culture since the beginning of the world has needed to do that." Such blithe condescension -- unworthy of this otherwise intelligent, well-written and learned book -- is best taken with a Paracelsian grain of salt.

Reviewed by Benson Bobrick
Copyright 2006, The Washington Post. All Rights Reserved.

Reader Reviews
Philip Theophrastus Bombast von Hohenheim came from the time of Erasmus, Luther, and Copernicus, and was in his way as influential as those giants, but he is hardly remembered now. Even by the name Paracelsus, which he took following the fashion of the humanists of his day to Latinize their names, he is unknown to most, though he makes personal appearances in the writings of Browning, Borges, Jung, and even A. J. Rowling, and his personal characteristics have been encompassed in the characters of Faust and Prospero. He wrote many books, almost none of which appeared during his lifetime, full of weird attempts to connect everything in the universe with everything else. He understood that matter was permeated by spirit, and that there were influences on both by astral bodies. His writings of occult science and theology are full of secret signs and symbols and neologisms that have defied any subsequent explanation. You don't have to try to get through his books; Philip Ball has done so, and seems to have absorbed every other aspect of medieval and Renaissance thought, to produce _The Devil's Doctor: Paracelsus and the World of Renaissance Magic and Science_ (Farrar, Straus and Giroux). A big, generous, and detailed look at this alchemist's life and times, and importantly his way of thinking, Ball's book is continually surprising about the man, the reactions to him, and his influence. One of Paracelsus's biggest achievements is that he did renounce the reliance on Aristotle and Galen; he insisted on finding out for himself what was true and not being bound by the prior abstract arguments of what had to be true. He was thus skeptical of the main currents of thought in cosmology and medicine, and in favor of learning from experience. Without a systematic methodology, however, he assimilated magical and alchemical thought in his own idiosyncratic way, taking what he fancied and fitting it in to his grand scheme. Even Ball admits that Paracelsus made no major discovery that is still part of science. So what is the fascination (and to be sure, the subject of this fine biography comes across as a fascinating man)? It turns out that he had some good ideas and useful practical applications. He emphasized the power of natural remedies, rather than the moribund concepts of balancing humors that were the standards of his age. Much of his success as a doctor was due to his advocacy of minimal treatment, rather than the phlebotomy, cautery, or amputations by which other doctors could turn even minor ailments into mortal injuries. He evaluated the sicknesses of miners and wrote the first manual of occupational health. At risk to himself, he investigated the plague. He believed that chemical processes, not demons, were responsible for madnesses of different kinds. When other medics considered the illnesses of women beneath their attention, he wrote specifically about them. At a time when it was unusual for anyone to venture more than a few miles from home, Ball chronicles Paracelsus's travels to Germany, Spain, Britain, Russia, Egypt and Greece. He was from time to time a military surgeon or royal physician, depending upon what the needs were and how his luck held out. Sometime he had to travel because a city or university expelled him; he never avoided disputes or criticism. Paracelsus died in 1541. Not only were most of his books printed after his death, the interest in his way of looking at the world increased, and he never lost fame as a healer. In the waves of cholera in the early nineteenth century, crowds came to the churchyard in Salzburg where he is buried, seeking the intervention of the secular saint. His specific teachings are still valued by those who believe in "magick", but they have given way to more scientific explanations and cures. Ball's fine biography not only shows how this remarkable man with often loony ideas helped break away from blind reliance on past theories, but how the break was the spark that eventually led to modern chemical and medical thought. It is thus not only the story of Paracelsus's life but of an important change in human understanding.