v] of Chemical Physiology. 127 



great man whom the orthodox doctors had given up to death, 

 now plunged into some ignoble quarrel and hard pressed with 

 penury, never staying long in one spot, true to nothing but to 

 the assertion of his own ideas, he ended at Salzburg in 1541, just 

 as Vesalius was finishing his great work, his strange pilgrim life, 

 by what is generally credited to have been a violent death in a 

 drunken brawl. 



The doctrines which he taught with such intemperate zeal 

 were as I have said in the main the doctrines of Valentine, but 

 enlarged, and developed by the new light which he had gained 

 by his own researches and studies. He discovered many new 

 chemical bodies, and introduced many new remedies. He had 

 a great hand in the spread of that drug, which perhaps more 

 than any one drug has influenced the fortunes of mankind, 

 namely laudanum, the use of which is said to have been due to 

 him. He was emphatically not an anatomist, not a physiologist, 

 but a pharmacologist. He paid little heed to the doctrines of 

 Galen, and cared little or nothing for anatomy. He was a chemist 

 to the backbone ; and his pathology was based not on changes 

 of structure and their attendant symptoms but on the relation 

 of diseases to drugs. He insisted that diseases ought to be 

 known by the names of the drugs which cured them, morbus 

 helleborinus, and the like ; in this he was a forerunner of an 

 errant school of therapeutics in modern times. 



His physiology, if we may so call it, may perhaps as part of 

 his philosophy be briefly described as follows : 



Nature consists of visible matter and invisible forces. The 

 visible matter is constituted of the three elements, sulphur, 

 mercury, and salt ; and attached to matter are forces, or 

 perhaps we should say properties, by which changes of matter 

 are brought about. But over and above these material forces 

 or properties, matter is subject to and its changes are governed 

 by spiritual forces, prominent among which are the archcei, " the 

 " chief archceus being that exalted invisible spirit, that occult 

 "virtue which is the artificer of nature in everyone." 



All physiological processes, according to him, are chemical 

 processes governed by the archceus. In health, all the varied 

 chemical processes are rightly governed by the archceus. 



