Hippocrates and Rhasis. And fact seemed to be on his side. He
reappeared in Germany about 1525, and began working wondrous cures. He
had brought back with him from the East an arcanum, a secret remedy, and
laudanum was its name. He boasted, says one of his enemies, that he
could raise the dead to life with it; and so the event all but proved.
Basle was then the university where free thought and free creeds found
their safest home; and hither OEcolampadius the reformer invited young
Paracelsus to lecture on medicine and natural science.

It would have been well for him, perhaps, had he never opened his lips.
He might have done good enough to his fellow-creatures by his own
undoubted powers of healing. He cured John Frobenius, the printer,
Erasmus's friend, at Basle, when the doctors were going to cut his leg
off. His fame spread far and wide. Round Basle and away into Alsace he
was looked on, even an enemy says, as a new AEsculapius.

But these were days in which in a university everyone was expected to
talk and teach, and so Paracelsus began lecturing; and then the weakness
which was mingled with his strength showed itself. He began by burning
openly the books of Galen and Avicenna, and declared that all the old
knowledge was useless. Doctors and students alike must begin over again
with him. The dons were horrified. To burn Galen and Avicenna was as
bad as burning the Bible. And more horrified still were they when
Paracelsus began lecturing, not in the time-honoured dog-Latin, but in
good racy German, which everyone could understand. They shuddered under
their red gowns and hats. If science was to be taught in German,
farewell to the Galenists' formulas, and their lucrative monopoly of
learning. Paracelsus was bold enough to say that he wished to break up
their monopoly; to spread a popular knowledge of medicine. "How much,"
he wrote once, "would I endure and suffer, to see every man his own
shepherd--his own healer." He laughed to scorn their long prescriptions,
used the simplest drugs, and declared Nature, after all, to be the best
physician--as a dog, he says, licks his wound well again without our
help; or as the broken rib of the ox heals of its own accord.

Such a man was not to be endured. They hated him, he says, for the same
reason that they hated Luther, for the same reason that the Pharisees
hated Christ. He met their attacks with scorn, rage, and language as
coarse and violent as their o