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Paracelsus: Revolutionary or Mystic?

An enfant terrible shook up Renaissance medicine by denouncing experts and debunking accepted wisdom. Was Paracelsus as radical as he seemed? Thanks to Joseph Goebbels, the film director Georg Wilhelm Pabst luxuriated in a massive budget for the dramatised documentary he shot in occupied Prague during the autumn of 1942.

Bragging about the low incidence of gout in his native Switzerland (according to his characteristically overblown rhetoric, the country was ‘superior to … all Western and Eastern Europe’), he suggested that salts in the water supply were coagulating inside the joints to produce painful nodules resembling gallstones or dental tartar. Paracelsus is frequently celebrated as the ‘father of toxicology’ because he recognised the principle that the same substance can have either deleterious or beneficial effects, depending on the quantity imbibed – or, as he put it: ‘Solely the dose determines that a thing is not a poison.’ Some of his other recommendations are preserved in modern medical practices, although these are often picked out selectively to give him more credit than he merits. Even some Latinised Linnean labels carry this cultural memory, including toothwort (dentaria) and lungwort (pulmonaria); conversely, orchitis – inflammation of the testicles – gained its name from the shape of orchid roots, which were used to treat venereal diseases and improve potency.

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