ABSTRACT
Few sixteenth century intellectuals would have been as well placed to drop names at social gatherings as Johannes Crato von Krafftheim. A student of Martin Luther and Philipp Melanchthon, personal physician to three emperors, and an apposite representative of the early modern medical Renaissance, Crato was an imposing figure in his time. The annals of history are full of figures like Crato-that is to say, individuals who were the leading experts of the day and occupied influential positions in society, but who receive only modest scholarly attention today. In contrast, outsiders whose innovative ideas never found full appreciation during their lives, such as Theophrastus von Hohenheim-who we commonly call Paracelsus-possess something approaching a clichéd place in cultural history. When the contrast between the establishment celebrity and the underappreciated genius reaches an extreme, it is fit for dramatization as in the fictional account of the animosity between Antonio Salieri and Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart immortalized in Peter Shaffer’s Amadeus. Frequently the hero worship of the unappreciated genius’s career becomes so intense-and that is true in spades with respect to Paracelsus-that the scholar’s chief task is to return the hero and the villain to their proper historical contexts.
