ABSTRACT
Paracelsianism is one of the great intellectual phenomena of the sixteenth century. In retrospect, we see it as a medical phenomenon, but in its origin it was much more than this. Though its permanent result was medical – the insertion of chemistry into medicine – it began as a total movement, a philosophy, a new Weltanschauung, with revolutionary implications. Seen in his context, in the intellectual history of his time, Paracelsus was a kindred spirit, and a rival, to his contemporary, Martin Luther. Both were products of the spiritual crisis of Germany in the early sixteenth century, and they shared many German, and many personal, characteristics. Like Luther, Paracelsus was a violent, intemperate man, of strong language and rough manners, and he addressed himself primarily to the German world: he wrote in German for Germans. His medical teaching was the application, within his own special field, of a general philosophy, indeed cosmology, which far transcended that field; and this philosophy, he claimed, as Luther claimed for his, was true Christianity, restored to its original purity, free at last from the corrupt incrustations of the Middle Ages. In Luther’s eyes, that corruption came from the paganism of the Roman Church; in those of Paracelsus, it came from the paganism of Aristotle and his medical disciple Galen.
