A HISTORY OF SCIENCE 



diseases more than offset his unpopularity. Gradually, 

 however, his bitter tongue and his coarse personality 

 rendered him so unpopular, even among his patients, 

 that, finally, his liberty and life being jeopardized, he 

 was obliged to flee from Basel, and became a wanderer. 

 He lived for brief periods in Colmar, Nuremberg, 

 Appenzell, Zurich, Pfeffers, Augsburg, and several 

 other cities, until finally at Salzburg his eventful life 

 came to a close in 1541. His enemies said that he 

 had died in a tavern from the effects of a protracted 

 debauch ; his supporters maintained that he had been 

 murdered at the instigation of rival physicians and 

 apothecaries. 



But the effects of his teachings had taken firm root, 

 and continued to spread after his death. He had 

 shown the fallibility of many of the teachings of the 

 hitherto standard methods of treating diseases, and 

 had demonstrated the advantages of independent 

 reasoning based on observation. In his Magicum he 

 gives his reasons for breaking with tradition. " I did," 

 he says, ''embrace at the beginning these doctrines, 

 as my adversaries (followers of Galen) have done, 

 but since I saw that from their procedures nothing 

 resulted but death, murder, stranglings, anchylosed 

 limbs, paralysis, and so forth, that they held most 

 diseases incurable, . . . therefore have I quitted this 

 wretched art, and sought for truth in any other 

 direction. I asked myself if there were no such thing 

 as a teacher in medicine, where could I learn this art 

 best ? Nowhere better than the open book of nature, 

 written with God's own finger." We shall see, 

 however, that this " book of nature" taught Paracelsus 



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