Other Renaissance (eBook)

PROLOGUE

LIFTING THE LID

PARACELSUS’S REPUTATION HAD SPREAD before him. His grand inaugural lecture in 1526 as professor of medicine at the University of Basel, the oldest and most prestigious in Switzerland, had attracted a large crowd. The front rows of the hall were filled with the city worthies in their robes of office; alongside them were the university professors bedecked in their black gowns with coloured sashes; and amongst them were the city’s fashionably attired leading physicians. Ordinary townsfolk, the merely curious, and many students were crammed into the back rows, squatting in the aisles, or spilling out through the open door into the main square.

Enter Paracelsus in his ragged leather alchemist’s apron, bearing aloft a covered platter. He began his lecture by announcing to the assembled company that he would now reveal to them the greatest secret of medical science. Whereupon, with a flourish, he lifted the lid from the platter. To reveal a pile of fresh human excrement.

The first rows of the audience, close enough for their nostrils to detect the odour of what lay before them, rose to their feet. Muttering angrily amongst themselves, they began making their way back up the aisles, their scowling faces forcing a path through the squatting students cluttering the exit.

Amidst the rising hubbub, Paracelsus’s voice could be heard calling out after them: ‘If you will not hear the mysteries of putrefaction, you are unworthy of the name of physicians.’ Paracelsus had long understood that fermentation was the most important chemical process to take place in the laboratory of the human body. Here lay the secret of life itself: how the human body functioned, gaining its nourishment and expelling extraneous, often toxic, matter. The students and other townsfolk who had come along for the show were not disappointed, and began applauding and cheering him to the rafters.

When order was finally restored, with intent students now occupying the front seats of the auditorium, Paracelsus resumed his lecture. He informed his audience that these were times of drastic change. That for the good of humanity our view of ourselves and our place in the world had to be transformed.* Elixirs of life, propitious alignments of the signs of the zodiac, and fallacious systems which prescribed a holistic internal balance of ‘humours’ as the key to human health were all now outmoded – mere things of the past. The world did not ultimately consist of earth, air, fire and water; and the time was over when the physician’s task was to relate these elements to the four humours, whose balance was said to control our health – namely, black bile (earth), blood (air), yellow bile (fire) and phlegm (water). The earth contained all manner of chemicals and plants, just as the body suffered from all manner of ailments and diseases. The task of the physician was to learn which of these chemicals and plants were appropriate for curing particular infirmities. Likewise, it was necessary to learn through experience the required dosages necessary to eliminate such illnesses. Suitably diluted quantities, regularly administered, might cure the patient; excessive doses were liable to be lethal. Here, Paracelsus was laying the foundations of modern pharmacology.

Thus spoke the man whom many regard as the father of modern medicine. Others, by contrast, continue to regard him as no more than a bombastic self-advertising quack. The Renaissance was in many ways a schizophrenic era. A number of its finest pioneering thinkers would frequently retain incongruous remnants of earlier medieval preconceptions, even as their discoveries opened up entirely new fields of knowledge which superseded such ideas. The upheaval in European thought which today we call the Renaissance was also divided in another sense. While many elements of the Renaissance originated in Florence and the city-states of Italy, a quasi-independent ‘Other Renaissance’ was coming into being north of the Alps. The Swiss physician Paracelsus was a prime, if somewhat uncouth, exemplar of both these processes.

The man we now know as Paracelsus was born on 1 May 1493 in the village of Egg in northern Switzerland, his given name being Theophrastus Bombastus von Hohenheim.* Later in life he would style himself as Paracelsus – meaning ‘greater than Celsus’, the first-century physician considered at the time to have been the greatest medical practitioner of the Ancient Roman era. For over a millennium, the works of Aulus Cornelius Celsus had been considered lost, their existence only known from admiring references which appeared in the manuscripts of his contemporaries and a number of later sources. Then, in the mid-1400s, a copy of Celsus’s De Medicina (On Medicine) was discovered by Pope Nicholas V in the Vatican archives. In 1478, Celsus’s treatise became one of the first medical works to be printed, immediately gaining a wide circulation and the high reputation it deserved.

Celsus’s medical expertise was largely grounded in the knowledge he had absorbed during the practice of his profession, and was for the most part unadulterated by the holistic theory, erroneous beliefs and sheer superstition which had accumulated around this subject during the many centuries since his death. Paracelsus was deeply struck by what he read of the Roman Celsus’s works, and decided to begin as he would go on – rejecting the orthodox traditional teachings of his era as inferior rubbish. This attitude, roundly proclaimed, meant that as a student he found it prudent to absent himself from a succession of German universities, including Heidelberg, Tübingen and Leipzig. Consequently he decided on a course of self-education, and set out to see for himself what he could discover. ‘Knowledge is experience,’ he proclaimed, an adage to which he would for the most part adhere throughout his controversial career. It would also become one of the central tenets of Renaissance scientific thought.

In the course of Paracelsus’s quest for self-education, he claimed to have tramped the highways and byways of Europe from Scandinavia to Constantinople, from Scotland to Sicily. Later, he would even assert that he had gained a medical doctorate at the University of Ferrara in 1515 or 1516 (accounts vary). However, the university records for this period had been lost, a fact of which he was almost certainly aware. During Paracelsus’s wanderings through the length and breadth of Europe (and possibly even as far afield as Egypt), he accumulated a vast compendium of medical knowledge, including many old wives’ tales, local superstitions and witches’ cures. He also sought out alchemists, consulting them on their various laboratory techniques.

Paracelsus became experienced at sorting the wheat from the chaff amongst these ‘cures’, discovering many genuinely efficacious herbs, plants and other ‘elixirs’. Likewise, he learned a number of fundamental principles from the alchemists’ experimental methods and materials, arriving at the conclusion that the human body itself operated in the manner of a chemical laboratory. He began developing a form of what became known as iatrochemistry, a medical chemistry using minerals to combat illness or malfunctions in the body’s internal workings. Here again, he insisted that practice was the way to knowledge: ‘The patients are your textbook, the sickbed is your study.’

On occasion, his successful treatment of a local worthy would result in him being appointed to a post at a nearby university. But his wilful eccentricity would soon become apparent. For a start, he insisted upon delivering his lectures dressed in an alchemist’s rough leather apron rather than formal academic robes. Rather than the customary Latin, he chose to lecture in German, so that he would be understood by all the local barber-surgeons, alchemists and itinerant quacks whom he publicly invited to hear him speak. His lectures tended to ridicule orthodox medical learning, in favour of his own revolutionary theories.

As a result, Paracelsus became hugely popular with his students and would frequently be carried off by them to the town’s taverns. Here he cut a curious figure amongst his roistering young admirers. His travels had given him the tanned visage of a vagabond. Yet his coarse, curiously hermaphroditic features were beardless. One report describes him as dressed in ‘beggar’s garb’, and he was in the habit of wearing the same scruffy clothes for months on end, not even bothering to remove them before he fell onto his bed in a drunken stupor. Bodily hygiene was evidently not part of his medical practice.

Another habit he developed, unusual for a physician, was to carry around with him at all times a large, ornately carved broadsword. This he claimed had been presented to him by the Grand Vizier of Constantinople, or had been discovered by chance atop a peak in the Alps, or… When enacting his outlandish traveller’s tales, he was liable to leap onto a tavern table, enthusiastically brandishing his sword above his head. He even gave it a name: Azoth, the alchemists’ term for the creative force of nature. It is said that he took his sword to bed with him. This was his constant and sole sleeping companion, for he is not known to have slept with any human companions, male or female. Impotence was the likely cause of his chastity. But despite this involuntary virtue, his general demeanour meant that his university faculty appointments seem to have lasted little longer than his time as a student at any...