Durant W. The Reformation. A History of European Civilization from Wyclif to Calvin: 1300-1564
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Sorbonne, where a professor innocent of Latin seemed a biological
monstrosity. Nevertheless he became surgeon to Henry II, then to
Francis II, then to Charles IX; and though a professed Huguenot, he
was spared by royal order in the Massacre of St. Bartholomew. His
Deux livres de chirurgie (1573) added little to the theory, much
to the practice, of surgery. He invented new instruments, introduced
artificial limbs, popularized the use of the truss in hernia, improved
podalic version in childbirth, made the first exarticulation of the
elbow joint, described monoxide poisoning, and indicated flies as
carriers of disease. Famous in the annals of medicine is his
demurrer to congratulations on his success in a difficult case: Je le
pansay, Dieu le guarit - "I treated him, God cured him." He died in
1590, age seventy-three. He had considerably improved the status and
competence of surgeons, and had given France, in surgery, that lead
which it was to retain for several centuries.
VII. PARACELSUS AND THE DOCTORS
-
In every generation men arise who, resenting the cautious
conservatism of the medical profession, lay claim to remarkable
cures by heterodox means, denounce the profession as cruelly
laggard, perform wonders for a time, and then lose themselves in a
mist of desperate extravagance and isolation. It is good that such
gadflies should appear now and then to keep medical thought on its
toes, and good that medicine should check hasty innovations in dealing
with human life. Here, as in politics and philosophy, radical youth
and conservative age unwillingly co-operate in that balance of
variation and heredity which is nature's technique of development.
Philippus Theophrastus Bombastus von Hohenheim called himself
Aureolus as signifying the carat of his brilliance, and Paracelsus
probably as a Latinization of Hohenheim. `063771 His father, Wilhelm
Bombast von Hohenheim, was the illegitimate son of a hot-tempered
Swabian noble. Left to shift for himself, Wilhelm practiced medicine
among poor villagers near Einsiedeln in Switzerland, and married
Elsa Ochsner, an innkeeper's daughter and nurse's aid, who soon
afterward developed a manic-depressive condition. This ambivalent
ancestry may have inclined Philip to instability, and to a resentful
sense of capacities inadequately nurtured by his environment. Born
in 1493, he grew up amid his father's patients, and perhaps in undue
familiarity with inns, whose unbuttoned life remained always to his
taste. A dubious story alleges that the boy was emasculated by a
wild boar or by drunken soldiers. No woman is known to have figured in
his adult life. When he was nine his mother drowned herself.
Probably for that reason father and son moved to Villach in Tirol.
There, says tradition, Wilhelm taught in a school of mines and dabbled
in alchemy. Certainly there were mines near by, and a smelter; and
it is likely that Philip learned there some of the chemistry with
which he was to revolutionize therapy.
At the age of fourteen he went off to study at Heidelberg. The
restlessness of his nature showed now in his quick passage from one
university to another- Freiburg, Ingolstadt, Cologne, Tubingen,
Vienna, Erfurt, finally (1513-15) Ferrara- though such scholastic
peregrination was frequent in the Middle Ages. In 1515, without having
won a degree, Philip- now Paracelsus- took service as a barber surgeon
in the army of Charles I of Spain. The campaign over, he resumed his
footloose life. If we may believe him, he practiced medicine in
Granada, Lisbon, England, Denmark, Prussia, Poland, Lithuania,
Hungary, "and other lands." `063772 He was in Salzburg during the
Peasants' War of 1525, treated their wounds, and sympathized with
their aims. He had a socialist spell; he denounced money, interest,
merchants, and advocated communism in land and trade, and equal
remuneration for all. `063773 In his first book, Archidoxa ( The
Arch-Wisdom, 1524), he rejected theology and lauded scientific
experiment. `063774 Arrested after the failure of the peasants'
revolt, he was saved from the gallows by evidence that he had never
taken up arms; but he was banished from Salzburg, and left in haste.
In 1527 he was at Strasbourg, practicing surgery and lecturing to
barber surgeons. His doctrine was a confusion of sense and nonsense,
magic and medicine- though God knows how the future will describe
our current certainties. He rejected astrology, then accepted it; he
would not give an enema when the moon was in the wrong phase. He
laughed at the divining rod, but claimed to have transmuted metals
into gold. `063775 Animated, like the young Agrippa, by a thirst for
knowledge, he sought anxiously the "philosopher's stone"- i.e., some
universal formula that would explain the universe. He wrote
credulously about gnomes, asbestos salamanders, and "signatures"-
the treatment of diseased organs with drugs resembling them in color
or form. He was not above using magical incantations and amulets as
cures- `063776 perhaps as suggestive medicine.
But this same man, dripping with the delusions of his time, boldly
advanced the application of chemistry to medicine. Sometimes he
spoke like a materialist: "Man derives from matter, and matter is
the whole universe." `063777 Man is to the universe as microcosm to
macrocosm; both are composed of the same elements- basically, salts,
sulfur, and mercury; and the apparently lifeless metals and minerals
are instinct with life. `063778 Chemotherapy is the use of the
macrocosm to cure the microcosm. Man is, in body, a chemical compound;
sickness is a disharmony not of Galen's "humours" but of the
chemical constituents of the body; here was the first modern theory of
metabolism. By and large the therapy of the age depended for its drugs
on the plant and animal world; Paracelsus, deep in alchemy, stressed
the curative possibilities of inorganic materials. He made mercury,
lead, sulfur, iron, arsenic, copper sulfate, and potassium sulfate
parts of the pharmacopoeia; he spread the use of chemical tinctures
and extracts; he was the first to make that "tincture of opium"
which we call laudanum. He encouraged the use of mineral baths, and
explained their diverse properties and effects.
He noted the occupational and geographical factors in disease,
studied fibroid phthisis in miners, and first linked cretinism with
endemic goiter. He advanced the understanding of epilepsy, and related
paralysis and speech disturbances to injuries of the head. Whereas
gout and arthritis had been generally accepted as natural and
incurable accompaniments of increasing age, Paracelsus claimed that
they were curable if diagnosed as due to acids formed by food residues
too long retained in the colon. "All diseases can be traced to a
coagulation of undigested matter in the bowels." `063779 These acids
of intestinal putrefaction he called "tartar" because their deposits
in joints, muscles, kidneys, and bladder "burn like hell, and Tartarus
is hell." `063780 "Doctors boast of their [knowledge of] anatomy,"
he said, "but they fail to see the tartar sticking to their
teeth"; `063781 and the word stuck. He proposed to check the formation
of such deposits in the body by a healthy diet, tonics, and improved
elimination; he tried to "mollify" the deposits by using laurel oil
and resin compounds; and in extreme cases he advocated surgery to
allow the accretions to escape or be removed. He claimed to have cured
many cases of gout by these methods, and some physicians in our time
believe they have made cures by following Paracelsus' diagnosis.
News of cures accomplished by Paracelsus in Strasbourg reached
Basel. There the famous printer Froben was suffering acute pain in his
right foot. The doctors advised amputation. Froben invited
Paracelsus to come to Basel and diagnose the case. Paracelsus came,
and effected a cure without use of the knife. Erasmus, then living
with Froben and many ailments, consulted Paracelsus, who prescribed
for him- we do not know with what success. In any case these famous
patients gave the young doctor new fame, and a strange medley of
circumstances brought him close to that university professorship which
he coveted.
At this time the Protestants were a majority in the city council
of Basel. Over the objections of Erasmus and the Catholic minority,
they dismissed Dr. Wonecker, the city physician, on the ground that he
had "uttered fresh words against the Reformation," `063782 and they
appointed Paracelsus in his place. The council and Paracelsus
assumed that the appointment carried with it the right to teach in the
university; but the faculty condemned the appointment, and- knowing
the weakness of Paracelsus in anatomy- proposed a public examination
of his fitness. He evaded the test, began practice as city
physician, and gave public lectures in a private hall without
university sanction (1527). He gathered students by a characteristic
invitation:
-
Theophrastus Bombast of Hohenheim, doctor of both medicines and
professor, greetings to the students of medicine. Of all disciplines
medicine alone... is recognized as a sacred art. Yet few doctors today
practice it with success, and therefore the time has come to bring
it back to its former dignity, to cleanse it from the leaven of the
barbarians, and to purge their errors. We shall do so not by
strictly adhering to the rules of the ancients, but exclusively by
studying nature and using the experience which we have gained in
long years of practice. Who does not know that most contemporary
doctors fail because they slavishly abide by the precepts of Avicenna,
Galen, and Hippocrates?... This may lead to splendid titles, but
does not make a true doctor. What a doctor needs is not eloquence or
knowledge of language and of books... but profound knowledge of Nature
and her works....
Thanks to the liberal allowance the gentlemen of Basel have
granted for that purpose, I shall explain the textbooks which I have
written on surgery and pathology, every day for two hours, as an
introduction to my healing methods. I do not compile these from
excerpts of Hippocrates or Galen. In ceaseless toil I created them
anew upon the foundations of experience, the supreme teacher of all
things. If I want to prove anything I shall not do so by quoting
authorities, but by experiment and by reasoning thereupon. If,
therefore, dear reader, you should feel the impulse to enter into
those divine mysteries, if within a brief lapse of time you should
want to fathom the depths of medicine, then come to me at Basel....
Basel, June 5, 1527. `063783
-
Thirty students registered for the course. At its opening Paracelsus
appeared in the customary professorial robe, but at once he cast it
aside, and stood forth in the rough garb and sooty leather apron of
the alchemist. His lectures on medicine were given in a Latin form
prepared by his secretary Oporinus (who later printed Vesalius's
Fabrica ); on surgery he spoke in German. This was a further shock to
the orthodox physicians, but hardly so disturbing as when Paracelsus
proposed that "no pharmacist should act in collusion with any
doctor." `063784 As if to signalize his scorn of traditional medicine,
he merrily threw into a bonfire- lit by students to celebrate St,
John's Day (June 24, 1527)- a recent medical text, probably the Summa
Jacobii. "I threw into St. John's Fire," he said, "the Summa of the
books, so that all the misfortunes might go up in the air with the
smoke. Thus the realm of medicine has been purged." `063785 Men
compared the gesture with Luther's burning of a papal bull.
Paracelsus' life in Basel was as heterodox as his lectures. "The two
years I passed in his company," said Oporinus, "he spent in drinking
and gluttony, day and night.... He was a spendthrift, so that
sometimes he had not a penny left.... Every month he had a new coat
made for him, and gave away his old one to the first comer; but
usually it was so dirty that I never wanted one." `063786 Heinrich
Bullinger gave a similar picture of Paracelsus as a hard drinker,
and "an extremely dirty, unclean man." `063787 But Oporinus
testified to remarkable cures performed by his master; "in curing
ulcers he almost did miracles in cases which had been given up by
others." `063788
The profession disowned him as a degreeless quack, a reckless
empiric, incapable of dissection and ignorant of anatomy. He opposed
dissection on the ground that the organs could be understood only in
their united and normal functioning in the living organism. He
returned the scorn of the doctors in the liveliest billingsgate. He
laughed at their barbarous prescriptions, their silk shirts, finger
rings, sleek gloves, and haughty gait; he challenged them to come
out of the classrooms into the chemical laboratory, to put on
aprons, soil their hands with the elements, and, bending over
furnaces, learn the secrets of nature by experiment and the sweat of
their brows. He made up for his lack of a degree by taking such titles
as "Prince of Philosophy and Medicine," "Doctor of Both Medicines"
(i.e., physician and surgeon), and "Propagator of Philosophy"; and
he salved the wounds of his vanity with the confidence of his
claims. "All shall follow me," he wrote, "and the monarchy of medicine
shall be mine.... All the universities and all the old writers put
together are less talented than my a__" `063789 Rejected by others, he
took as his motto, Alterius non sit qui suus esse potest - "Let him
not belong to another who can be his own." `063790 History rebuked his
boasts by making his family name Bombast a common noun.
Whether through collusion with the university faculty, or in a
spontaneous revolt of students against a dogmatic teacher, an
anonymous Basel wit composed- and prominently exposed- a lampoon in
dog-Latin, purporting to be written by Galen himself from Hades
against his detractor, whom he called Cacophrastus- Dung-speaker. It
made great fun of Paracelsus' mystical terminology, called him a
madman, and suggested that he hang himself. Unable to find the
culprit, Paracelsus asked the town council to question the students
one by one, and to punish the guilty. The council ignored the request.
About this time a canon of the Basel Cathedral offered a hundred
guilders to anyone who would cure him of his disease; Paracelsus cured
him in three days; the canon paid him six guilders, but refused the
rest on the ground that the cure had taken so little time.
Paracelsus sued him in court, and lost. He lost his temper too,
denounced his critics as Bescheisser and Arschkratzer (cheaters
and rear-scratchers), and published, anonymously, a pamphlet
branding the clergy and magistrates as corrupt. The council ordered
his arrest, but deferred execution of the order till the next morning.
During the night Paracelsus fled (1528). He had been ten months in
Basel.
In Nuremberg he recapitulated his experience at Basel. The city
fathers gave him charge of a prison hospital; he worked impressive
cures; but he inveighed against the jealous medicos of the town for
their dishonesty, their opulence, and the size of their wives.
Noting that the majority of the council was Protestant, he defended
Catholicism. The Fuggers, who sold guaiac, were alarmed by his
contention that this "holy wood" was useless in the treatment of
syphilis. In 1530 he persuaded an obscure printer to publish Three
Chapters on the French Disease, which so berated the doctors that a
storm of opposition forced him to resume his wandering. He wished to
publish a larger work on the same subject, but the city council
forbade its printing; Paracelsus, in a letter to the council,
pleaded with ineffective eloquence for the freedom of the press; the
book was never printed in his lifetime. It contained the best clinical
description of syphilis yet written, and advised internal doses,
rather than external applications, of mercury. Syphilis became a
battleground of vegetable vs. chemical therapy.
Moving to Saint-Gall, Paracelsus lived for half a year in the
house of a patient. There and later he wrote his Opus paramirum -
"the very wonderful work"- his Paragranum - "against the grain"?- and
Die grosse Wundartzney ( The Great Surgery ), all in rough German.
They are heaps of crude ore, with here and there a gem. In 1534 he
relapsed into magic, and composed Philosophia sagax, a compendium of
the occult.
When his patient in Saint-Gall died he took to the road again,
passing from place to place in Germany, sometimes begging his bread.
In his youth he had uttered some religious heresies- that baptism
has only symbolic significance, that the sacraments are good for
children and fools, but useless for men of intelligence, and that
prayers to the saints are a waste of time. `063791 Now (1532), poor
and defeated, he experienced religious "conversion." He fasted, gave
his remaining goods to the poor, wrote essays of devotion, and
consoled himself with hopes of paradise. In 1540 the Bishop of
Salzburg offered him asylum, and the man who had encouraged revolution
there fifteen years before accepted gratefully. He made his will,
bequeathing his few coins to relatives, his instruments to the
barber surgeons of the city; and on September 24, 1541, he yielded his
body to the earth.
He was a man overcome by his own genius, rich in varied experience
and brilliant perceptions, but too little schooled to separate science
from magic, too undisciplined to control his fire, too angrily hostile
to infuse his influence into his time. Perhaps his career, along
with Agrippa's, helped to swell the legend of Faust. Until a century
ago people suffering an epidemic in Austria made a pilgrimage to his
grave in Salzburg, hoping to be healed by the magic of his spirit or
his bones. `063792
VIII. THE SKEPTICS
-
The sixteenth century was a poor time for philosophy; theology
absorbed the active thinkers, and faith, ruling every roost, kept
reason in its train. Luther rejected reason as inclining to
atheism, `063793 but cases of atheism were rare. A Dutch priest was
burned at The Hague (1512) for denying creation, immortality, and
the divinity of Christ, `063794 but he was not clearly an atheist.
"This year," wrote an English chronicler under 1539, "there died in
the University of Paris a great doctor, which said there was no God,
and had been of that opinion since he was twenty years old, and was
above fourscore years old when he died; and all that time he had
kept that error secret." `063795 Guillaume Postel, in 1552,
published a book Contra atheos, but the word atheist was seldom
distinguished from deist, pantheist, or skeptic.
Skeptics were numerous enough to win a blow from Luther. "For the
blind children of the world," he is reported to have said, "the
articles of faith are too high. That three persons are only one God,
that the true Son of God was made man, that in Christ there are two
natures, divine and human, etc.- all this offends them as fiction
and fable"; and some, he added, doubted whether God had created men
whose damnation He had foreseen. `063796 In France there were some
skeptics of immortality. `063797 Bonaventure Desperiers, in his
Cymbalum mundi (1537), ridiculed miracles, the contradictions of the
Bible, and the persecution of heretics. His book was condemned by
Calvin and the Sorbonne, and was burned by the official hangman.
Marguerite had to banish him from her court at Nerac, but she sent him
money to keep him alive at Lyons. In 1544 he killed himself, leaving
his manuscripts to Marguerite, "prop and safeguard of all
goodness." `063798
The spirit of doubt appeared in politics in the form of attacks on
the divine right and inviolability of kings; and here the skeptics
were usually Protestant thinkers uncomfortable under Catholic
rulers, or Catholic thinkers smarting under the triumph of the
state. Bishop John Ponet, resenting Mary Tudor, published in 1558 A
Short Treatise of Politique Power, which argued that "the manifold
and continual examples that have been, from time to time, of the
deposing of kings and killing of tyrants, do most certainly confirm it
to be most true, just, and consonant to God's judgment.... Kings,
princes, and governors have their authority of the people... and men
may recover their proxies... when it pleaseth them." `063799 John
Major, a Scottish professor who helped to form the mind of John
Knox, argued likewise that since all secular authority derives from
the will of the community, a bad king may be deposed and executed, but
only by due process of law.
The most interesting opponent of royal absolutism was a young
Catholic who achieved a modest immortality by dying in Montaigne's
arms. Etienne de la Boetie, said the incomparable essayist, "was the
greatest man, to my mind, of our age." `0637100 Son of a high official
in Perigord, Etienne studied law at Orleans, and, before the
prescribed age, was admitted as a councilor to the Parlement of
Bordeaux. About 1549, as a youth of nineteen inspired with
republican ideas by his study of Greek and Roman literature, he wrote-
he never published- a passionate attack on absolutism. He called it
Discours sur la servitude volontaire, but as it denounced the
dictatorship of one over many, it came to be called Contr'un,
Against One. Hear its flaming appeal:
-
What a shame and disgrace it is when countless men obey a tyrant
willingly, even slavishly! A tyrant who leaves them no rights over
property, parents, wife, or child, not even over their own lives- what
kind of a man is such a tyrant? He is no Hercules, no Samson! Often he
is a pygmy, often the most effeminate coward among the whole people-
not his own strength makes him powerful, him who is often the slave of
the vilest whores. What miserable creatures are his subjects! If
two, three, or four do not revolt against one, there is an
understandable lack of courage. But when hundreds and thousands do not
throw off the shackles of an individual, what remains there of
individual will and human dignity?... To free oneself it is not
necessary to use force against a tyrant. He falls as soon as the
country is tired of him. The people who are being degraded and
enslaved need but deny him any right. To be free only calls for the
earnest will to shake off the yoke.... Be firmly resolved no longer to
be slaves- and you are free! Deny the tyrant your help, and like a
colossus whose pedestal is pulled away, he will collapse and break
to pieces. `0637101
-
La Boetie proceeded to formulate Rousseau and Tom Paine. Man
naturally longs for liberty; inequalities of fortune are fortuitous,
and lay upon the fortunate the obligation to serve their fellow men;
all men are brothers, "made from the same mold" by the same God.
Strange to say, it was the reading of this radical pronouncement
that attracted the normally cool and cautious Montaigne to La
Boetie, and led (1557) to one of the most famous friendships in
history. Montaigne was then twenty-four, Etienne was twenty-seven;
perhaps Montaigne was then young enough to harbor radical
sentiments. Their friendship was soon ended by La Boetie's death at
the age of thirty-two (1563). Montaigne described the final days as if
remembering Plato's account of the death of Socrates. He so keenly
felt the loss of the warmhearted youth that seventeen years later he