Complete Record - Heirs of Hippocrates No. 205

PARACELSUS (1493-1541) Von der frantzösischen Kranckheit drey Bücher. Durch Friderich Peypus 1530] [54] ll. 18.4 cm.

Philippus Theophrastus Bombastus von Hohenheim is universally known merely as Paracelsus, a name invented by friends who apparently saw in him a genius "surpassing Celsus." He was born in Switzerland and educated at Basel, where he was appointed town physician and professor at the University. But his unorthodox ideas and teachings put him at loggerheads with the orthodox establishment of his revolutionary time and he spent most of his life wandering through Europe as an itinerant physician, chemist, theologian, and philosopher. Although his ideas were still bound up in alchemy and astrology, and his writings imbued with a mysticism which makes them difficult to interpret, in the field of practical medicine he was usually in advance of his time and attracted many followers. "First, he applied chemical techniques to pharmacy and therapeutics. . . . Secondly, in his medical teaching he abandoned the ruling system of 'humours'; the beginnings of modern pathology can be seen in his work. . . . His influence on the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries was profound . . . and the work of Helmont . . . is unthinkable without him" (John Carter and Percy H. Muir, Printing and the mind of man. London, 1967. p. 66). Paracelsus was a prolific writer, but few of his works were published during his lifetime. In the century after his death, however, his works came tumbling from the press by the hundreds. The present rare work is one of the few published during his lifetime and, despite the title, is his famous blast at "quacks" and "false physicians" who preyed on superstition and who treated with useless and sometimes harmful remedies.

Cited references: Durling 3450 (1553 ed.); Garrison-Morton 2369 (1553 ed.); Sudhoff 7

Gift of John Martin, M.D.