Semi-Cmitennial Volume. 49 



pathological conditions, regardless of theories, whether they come to us 

 with names hoary with age and ludici'ous from their novelty. Day by 

 day the veil of ignorance, superstition and intolerance is being lifted, and 

 the time is near at hand when independent thought and correct reasoning 

 must and will bear sway. Then the practice of medicine will stand 

 upon merit and her own worth. She demands this and nothing more. 

 Ottawa. 



The Early History of Pharmaceutical and Medical Chemistry. 



L. E. Sayre. 



If any one is inclined to boast of his ancestry, we are told he will be 

 relieved of his self-esteem if he goes back a few generations, when he is 

 sure to find a jail-bird or some sort of a criminal. Pharmacy and medi- 

 cine alike, by such a process, will be obliged to be somewhat modest, at 

 least if they look up their past history. One need not go back farther 

 than the sixteenth century — the period of medical mysticism, the iatro- 

 chemical period — to discover one of our forefathers, Paracelsus by cur- 

 rent name. His real name, however, was Phillipus Aurelolus Para- 

 celsus Theophrastus Bombastus von Hohenheim. He was certainly a 

 "bird" if not a jail-bird. One writer says of him: "He lived like a pig, 

 looked like a drover, found his greatest enjoyment in the company of 

 the most dissolute and lowest rabble, and throughout his glorious life 

 was generally drunk." It is true that his life offered a strong contrast 

 to his mentality, but he was a man of noble character and intentions, 

 an ambulatory theosophist, who hoped to inspire mankind with a love 

 of conscientiousness and veracity and to restore the suffering to health. 

 He, bad as he was, liberated chemistry from the yoke of alchemy and 

 joined it with medicine. He was an iatro-chemist, which, being trans- 

 lated from the Greek, signifies physician-chemist. He accomplished 

 this during a period of ecclesiastical and national reformation, when 

 Luther and Calvin were combating against superstition, and the changes 

 he wrought, through his originality of thought and teaching, and free- 

 dom and vigor of expression, well entitle him to the appellation some have 

 seen fit to give him, the "Luther of Medicine." So desirous was he of 

 penetrating into the mysteries of nature, however, that he neglected 

 books and took prolonged journeys through most of the known countries 

 of the world (probably distances of about that from Kansas City to 

 Chicago, or less). He sought to glean every scrap of knowledge obtain- 

 able from literary and learned men, mechanics, metallurgical workers, 

 occults, and every one with whom he came in contact. He returned 

 to Switzerland about 1525, and was recommended to the chair of physic 

 at Basel. His self-confidence appears at this institution by publicly 

 burning the works of Avicenna and Galen. He at once began his fight 

 against the old medical school. He was forced to leave Basel in 1527, 

 after a quarrel with the municipal council, and withdrew into Alsace, 

 whither his fame in medicine followed him. 



4 — Acad. Sci. — 2199 



