3.

(9) Anna M. Stoddart: The Life of Paracelsus, London, John
Murray, 1911.

Paracelsus is the Luther of medicine, the very incarnation of the spirit
of revolt. At a period when authority was paramount, and men blindly
followed old leaders, when to stray from the beaten track in any field
of knowledge was a damnable heresy, he stood out boldly for independent
study and the right of private judgment. After election to the chair at
Basel he at once introduced a startling novelty by lecturing in German.
He had caught the new spirit and was ready to burst all bonds both in
medicine and in theology. He must have startled the old teachers and
practitioners by his novel methods. "On June 5, 1527, he attached a
programme of his lectures to the black-board of the University inviting
all to come to them. It began by greeting all students of the art of
healing. He proclaimed its lofty and serious nature, a gift of God to
man, and the need of developing it to new importance and to new renown.
This he undertook to do, not retrogressing to the teaching of the
ancients, but progressing whither nature pointed, through research into
nature, where he himself had discovered and had verified by prolonged
experiment and experience. He was ready to oppose obedience to old
lights as if they were oracles from which one did not dare to differ.
Illustrious doctor smight be graduated from books, but books made not a
single physician.(10) Neither graduation, nor fluency, nor the knowledge
of old languages, nor the reading of many books made a physician, but
the knowledge of things themselves and their properties. The business
of a doctor was to know the different kinds of sicknesses, their
causes, their symptoms and their right remedies. This he would teach, for
he had won this knowledge through experience, the greatest teacher, and
with much toil. He would teach it as he had learned it, and his lectures
would be founded on works which he had composed concerning inward and
external treatment, physic and surgery."(11) Shortly afterwards, at
the Feast of St. John, the students had a bonfire in front of the
university. Paracelsus came out holding in his hands the "Bible of
medicine," Avicenna's "Canon," which he flung into the flames saying:
"Into St. John's fire so that all misfortune may go into the air with
the smoke." It was, as he explained afterwards, a symbolic act: "What
has perished must go to the fire; it is no longer fit for u