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praise and the blame are usually administered in very 

 unequal measure, and with no due regard to the 

 intrinsic merits of the recipient. The common instinct 

 of mankind is to oppose change, and he who sets him- 

 self athwart the general tendency to consider whatever 

 is is right is certain to reap abuse for his pains, and to 

 have his motives, however well meant, misrepresented 

 and traduced. History shows that most reformers are 

 in advance of their age. It is rarely that they hit 

 what is mistakenly called the psychological moment — 

 that is, when the world is ripe for the change they 

 advocate, and willing and even eager to see it effected. 

 In this exceptional case the reformer is extolled, his 

 service universally acclaimed, and his immediate 

 fame assured. The pioneer who has to face the vis 

 inerliae of his age may, and usually does, go down to his 

 grave " unwept, unhonoured, and unsung." It is only 

 when the fermenting leaven he has laboured to intro- 

 duce has, it may be after many years, produced its 

 effect, that his effort is recognised and its results 

 appreciated. 



Such was the fate of him who is the subject of the 

 work under notice. No man of his epoch was so 

 systematically and so consistently disparaged, abused, 

 and reviled as Theophrastus von Hohenheim, commonly 

 called Paracelsus. His true vocation was that of a 

 medical practitioner, and the head and front of his 

 offending was that he should have striven to enlarge the 

 scope of the medical system of his time — not simply by 

 opposing the time-honoured doctrine of Hippocrates 

 and Galen, as authorised by all the medical faculties 

 of the period in every University of Europe — but by 

 seeking to graft on to it newer conceptions and a wider 

 and more rational scheme of therapeutics. 



Paracelsus is frequently regarded as a chemist, and 

 he certainly has his place in the history of chemistry. 

 But he made no cardinal discovery in that science, and 

 his name is not associated with any process or apparatus 

 in operative chemistry. He wrote no treatise ex- 

 clusively concerned with chemistry. He led a restless 

 wandering existence, travelling, according to his own 

 account, over nearly the whole known world, picking 

 up and mentally storing the medical arcana of the 

 various countries he traversed. 



During the forty-eight troubled years of his chequered 

 life Paracelsus certainly acquired a considerable 

 knowledge of the chemical arts of his time ; he writes 

 familiarly of certain chemical processes, and shows 

 acquaintance with the properties and uses of a fairly- 

 wide range of manufactured products. His great 

 service to chemistry was that he was among the 

 earliest to point out that the work of the professed 

 chemists of his epoch was on wholly wrong lines. The 

 ostensible objects of alchemy were illusory. In con- 

 NO. 2754, VOL. I IO] 



ceiving the possibility of transmutation the alchemists 

 were imagining a vain thing. The true and proper 

 function of the chemist was to serve humanity by 

 preparing and studying the properties of substances 

 of natural and factitious origin with a view of applying 

 them in the treatment and cure of disease. 



By thus creating the school of iatro-chemistry 

 Paracelsus enlarged greatly the field of chemistry and 

 extended enormously the scope of its operations. But, 

 strictly speaking, Paracelsus only reverted thereby 

 to the practice of the Arabian followers of Galen — 

 Avicenna, Averrhoes, and their immediate followers — 

 who taught that chemistry was the true hand-maiden 

 of medicine. Their precepts had been misinterpreted 

 and corrupted by a succession of commentators — 

 mostly scholastics — who had imported into their teach- 

 ing a leaven of mysticism and occultism altogether 

 foreign to the spirit of Galen. Erasmus said of the 

 medical system of his time that the whole art as they 

 practised it was but an incorporated compound of 

 craft and imposture. 



The reform of medicine was part of the general 

 movement of the Renaissance, and Paracelsus was as 

 much a product of the period as Leonardo da Vinci, 

 Copernicus, Thomas More, Luther, Vesalius, and the 

 other progenitors of that great awakening. He created 

 not only a new departure in chemistry, but he infused 

 a new spirit into medical teaching and practice, and 

 his reward was to suffer the slings and arrows of 

 outrageous fortune in obloquy, poverty, and occasional 

 starvation. He was fighting against the Zunftgeist of 

 his age, against powerful corporations and strongly 

 entrenched vested interests. Although he fell in the 

 unequal struggle he was not beaten, for the spirit he 

 invoked lived after him and eventually triumphed. 



Paracelsus was a highly complex character — a 

 strange compound of genius and folly, of ill-regulated 

 life and unstable habits. It is this complexity of 

 nature which is doubtless at the basis of the very 

 divergent estimates which his various biographers have 

 formed of him. He had all the defects of his qualities, 

 and to a great extent he brought his misfortunes upon 

 himself. He was of a rash, unbalanced disposition, 

 impetuous, impatient of contradiction, a hard-hitter, 

 and prone to intemperate language. Of course, he 

 was stigmatised as a quack and a charlatan, and it must 

 be admitted there were incidents in his career which 

 afforded ground for the imputation. He seems to have 

 treated the reproach with a contemptuous indifference 

 which afforded no sufficient answer to his adversaries 

 and no real satisfaction to his few followers and friends. 



In spite of much that has been written concerning 

 him Paracelsus remains an enigma, and his memory 

 still suffers from the obloquy which was heaped upon 



