comes from ability, and
ability comes from the spirit" (Archaeus).

No one has held more firmly the dualistic conception of the healing art.
There are two kinds of doctors; those who heal miraculously and those
who heal through medicine. Only he who believes can work miracles. The
physician has to accomplish that which God would have done miraculously,
had there been faith enough in the sick man (Stoddart, p. 194). He
had the Hippocratic conception of the "vis medicatrix naturae"--no one
keener since the days of the Greeks. Man is his own doctor and finds
proper healing herbs in his own garden: the physician is in ourselves,
in our own nature are all things that we need: and speaking of wounds,
with singular prescience he says that the treatment should be defensive
so that no contingency from without could hinder Nature in her work
(Stoddart, p. 213).

Paracelsus expresses the healing powers of nature by the word "mumia,"
which he regarded as a sort of magnetic influence or force, and he
believed that anyone possessing this could arrest or heal disease
in others. As the lily breaks forth in invisible perfume, so healing
influences may pass from an invisible body. Upon these views of
Paracelsus was based the theory of the sympathetic cure of disease
which had an extraordinary vogue in the late sixteenth and seventeenth
centuries, and which is not without its modern counterpart.

In the next century, in Van Helmont we meet with the Archaeus everywhere
presiding, controlling and regulating the animate and inanimate bodies,
working this time through agents, local ferments. The Rosicrucians had
their direct inspiration from his writings, and such mystics as the
English Rosicrucian Fludd were strong Paracelsians.(14)

(14) Robert Fludd, the Mystical Physician, British Medical
Journal, London, 1897, ii, 408.

The doctrine of contraries drawn from the old Greek philosophy,
upon which a good deal of the treatment of Hippocrates and Galen was
based--dryness expelled by moisture, cold by heat, etc.--was opposed by
Paracelsus in favor of a theory of similars, upon which the practice of
homeopathy is based. This really arose from the primitive beliefs, to
which I have already referred as leading to the use of eyebright in
diseases of the eye, and cyclamen in diseases of the ear because of its
resemblance to that part; and the Egyptian organotherapy had the same
basis,--spleen would cure spleen, heart, heart, etc. In t