ABSTRACT
One of the great heroes of Jung's later years was an irascible and passionate physician who was always being hounded out of town by his professional colleagues but was sought out and loved by his patients. Theophrastus Bombast von Hohenheim—known to us as the Renaissance physician and alchemist Paracelsus—grew up in the Swiss town of Einsiedeln, in the shadow of the famous Benedictine abbey which had been a pilgrimage center already for hundreds of years. Paracelsus combined in his person two very typically Swiss characteristics: an attitude of inner piety and a fierce independence of thinking. He remained his whole life long a devoted “son of the church” but in his work and in his writing he made such revolutionary changes in how medicine was understood and practiced that many people doubted both his faith and his sanity.
