The Devil Doctor Paracelsus And The World Of Renaissance Magic And Science

Book: The Devil Doctor Paracelsus And The World Of Renaissance Magic And Science by Philip Ball

To his successful popular-science titles, Ball adds this biography of an outlandish Renaissance figure. Paracelsus (1493-1541) trained in medicine but ridiculed the profession's medieval scholasticism. Incorrigibly impolitic, he sought to reform medicine with all manner of alchemical means and metatheories that seem strange by modern lights, impudent by those of a civilization in transition from magical to rational thought, and heroic to future Romantic poets. Here is the picture of one man against the world, and Ball makes the most of his sprawling, spendthrift, undisciplined life. A lifelong itinerant, Paracelsus ranged the expanse of Europe, offending, befriending, and moving on. Ball handles the travelogue as a book in itself, parallel to his summaries of Paracelsus' writings on health, alchemy, astrology, and himself. An enlivening portrait that will spark interest in Paracelsus' role in the rise of science. 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. 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...." The Devil's Doctor is a remarkably well written biography of Paracelsus as well as social history of his life time, that period in European History when the Scholastic mindset of the Medieval was being challenged by the coming Enlightenment. Ball, who writes with great clarity and skillful organization shows Paracelsus as a unique individual in the middle of this social revolution, not seeing the whole picture, but living on both sides of the split. An alchemist who grew up in a mining region of Switzerland where the Manipulation of metals was prevelant he received a scolastic education in medicine. He left early because he realized that the medicine of the Greeks no longer served. He sought out the best teachers and herbalists to educate himself and was recognized as one of the best doctors of his time. He grew up in the Roman church, but thought, wrote, and preached independently his own brand of Spirituality barely escaping condemnation for heresy. I had read bits and pieces about Paracelsus over the years, but gathered almost nothing about the man. By putting Paracelsus in his time and many places (the man traveled a get deal for the times), Ball has made him real and his significance to European, and so world, history understandable. I can't say I disliked anything about this book. Except, maybe, the fact that Paracelsus was associated with so many interesting characters who deserved books of their own, which I'll probably never find. I highly recommend this book to those interested in this period of history even if they scoff at alchemy. If they scoff, Ball will give them a better Understanding of its significance to the period.

Buy Philip Ball's book: The Devil Doctor Paracelsus And The World Of Renaissance Magic And Science

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Jacob Bohmen Biography

Jacob Bohmen, thought he could discover the secret of the transmutation of metals in the Bible, and who invented a strange heterogeneous doctrine of mingled alchemy and religion, and founded upon it the sect of the Aurea-crucians. He was born at Gorlitz, in Upper Lusatia, in 1575; and followed, till his thirtieth year, the occupation of a shoemaker. In this obscurity he remained, with the character of a visionary and a man of unsettled mind, until the promulgation of the Rosicrucian philosophy in his part of Germany, toward the year 1607 or 1608. From that time he began to neglect his leather, and buried his brain under the rubbish of metaphysics. The works of Paracelsus fell into his hands; and these, with the reveries of the Rosicrucians, so completely engrossed his attention that be abandoned his trade altogether, sinking, at the same time, from a state of Comparative Independence into poverty and destitution. But he was nothing daunted by the miseries and privations of the flesh; his mind was fixed upon the beings of another sphere, and in thought he was already the new apostle of the human race. In the year 1612, after a meditation of four years, he published his first work, entitled "Aurora; or, The Rising of the Sun;" embodying the ridiculous notions of Paracelsus, and worse confounding the confusion of that writer. The philosopher's stone might, he contended, be discovered by a diligent search of the Old and New Testaments, and more especially of the Apocalypse, which alone contained all the secrets of alchymy. He contended that the Divine Grace operated by the same rules, and followed the same methods, that the Divine Providence observed in the natural world; and that the minds of men were purged from their vices and corruptions in the very same manner that metals were purified from their dross, namely, by fire. Besides the sylphs, gnomes, undines, and salamanders, he acknowledged various ranks and orders of demons. He pretended to invisibility and absolute chastity. He also said that, if it pleased him, he could abstain for years from meat and drink, and all the necessities of the body. It is needless, however, to pursue his follies any further. He was reprimanded for writing this work by the magistrates of Gorlitz, and commanded to leave the pen alone and stick to his wax, that his family might not become chargeable to the parish. He neglected this good advice, and continued his studies; burning minerals and purifying metals one day, and mystifying the Word of God on the next. He afterwards wrote three other works, as sublimely ridiculous as the first. The one was entitled Metallurgia, and has the slight merit of being the least obscure of his compositions. Another was called The Temporal Mirror of Eternity and the last his Theosophy Revealed, full of allegories and metaphors. Many of them became, during the seventeenth century, as distinguished for absurdity as their master; amongst whom may be mentioned Gifftheil, Wendenhagen, John Jacob Zimmermann, and Abraham Frankenberg. Their heresy rendered them obnoxious to the Church of Rome; and many of them suffered long imprisonment and torture for their faith. One, named Kuhlmann, was burned alive at Moscow, in 1684, on a charge of sorcery. Bohmen's works were translated into English, and published, many years afterwards by an enthusiast, named William Law. Bohmen died in 1624, leaving behind him a considerable number of admiring disciples.

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John Mayow (May, 1643 - September, 1679), English chemist and physiologist, was born in London. At the age of fifteen he went up to Wadham College, Oxford, of which he became a scholar a year later, and in 1660 he was elected to a fellowship at All Souls. He graduated in law (bachelor, 1665, doctor, 1670), but made medicine his profession, and became noted for his practice--therein, especially in the summer time, in the city of Bath. In 1678, on the proposal of Robert Hooke, he was chosen a fellow of the Royal Society. The following year, after a marriage which was not altogether to his content, he died in London in September 1679. He published at Oxford in 1668 two tracts, on respiration and rickets, and in 1674 these were reprinted, the former in an enlarged and corrected form, with three others De sal-nitro et spiritu nitro-aereo, De respiratione foetus in utero et ovo, and De motu musculari et spiritibus animalibus as Tractatus quinque medico-physici. The contents of this work, which was several times republished and translated into Dutch, German and French, show him to have been an investigator much in advance of his time. Accepting as proved by Boyle's experiments that air is necessary for combustion, he showed that fire is supported not by the air as a whole but by a more active and subtle part of it. This part he called "spiritus igneo-aereus," or sometimes "nitro-aereus"; for he identified it with one of the constituents of the acid portion of nitre which he regarded as formed by the union of fixed alkali with a spiritus acidus. In combustion the particulae nitro-aereae--either pre-existent in the thing consumed or supplied by the air combined with the material burnt; as he inferred from his observation that antimony, strongly heated with a burning glass, undergoes an increase of weight which can be attributed to nothing else but these particles. In respiration he argued that the same particles are consumed, because he found that when a small animal and a lighted candle were placed in a closed vessel full of air the candle first went out and soon afterwards the animal died, but if there was no candle present it lived twice as long. He concluded that this constituent of the air is absolutely necessary for life, and supposed that the lungs separate it from the atmosphere and pass it into the blood. It is also necessary, he inferred, for all muscular movements, and he thought there was reason to believe that the sudden contraction of muscle is produced by its combination With Other combustible (salino-sulphureous) particles in the body; hence the heart, being a muscle, ceases to beat when respiration is stopped. Animal heat also is due to the union of nitro-aerial particles, breathed in from the air, with the combustible particles in the blood, and is further formed by the combination of these two sets of particles in muscle during violent exertion. In effect, therefore, Mayow--who also gives a remarkably correct anatomical Description of the mechanism of respiration--preceded Priestley and Lavoisier by a century in recognizing the existence of oxygen, under the guise of his "spiritus nitro-aereus," as a separate entity distinct from the general mass of the air; he perceived the part it plays in combustion and in increasing the weight of the calces of metals as compared with metals themselves; and, rejecting the common notions of his time that the use of breathing is to cool the heart, or assist the passage of the blood from the right to the left side of the heart, or merely to agitate it, he saw in inspiration a mechanism for introducing oxygen into the body, where it is consumed for the production of heat and muscular activity, and even vaguely conceived of expiration as an excretory process.

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Sir Isaac Newton (January 4, 1643 - March 31, 1727) was an English mathematician, physicist, astronomer, alchemist, and natural philosopher who is generally regarded as one of the greatest scientists and mathematicians in history. Newton wrote the Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica, in which he described universal gravitation and the three laws of motion, laying the groundwork for classical mechanics. By deriving Kepler's laws of planetary motion from this system, he was the first to show that the motion of objects on Earth and of celestial bodies are governed by the same set of natural laws. The unifying and deterministic power of his laws was integral to the scientific revolution and the Advancement of heliocentrism. Among other scientific discoveries, Newton realized that the spectrum of colors observed when white light passes through a prism is inherent in the white light and not added by the prism (as Roger Bacon had claimed in the Thirteenth century), and notably argued that light is composed of particles. He also developed a law of cooling, describing the rate of cooling of objects when exposed to air. He enunciated the principles of conservation of momentum and angular momentum. Finally, he studied the speed of sound in air, and voiced a theory of the origin of stars. Despite this renown in mainstream science, Newton actually spent more time working on alchemy than physics, writing considerably more papers on the former than the latter. Newton played a major role in the Development of calculus, sharing credit with Gottfried Leibniz. He also made contributions to other areas of mathematics, for example the generalized binomial theorem. The mathematician and mathematical physicist Joseph Louis Lagrange (1736-1813), said that "Newton was the greatest genius that ever existed and the most fortunate, for we cannot find more than once a system of the world to establish."

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