y such teaching raised a storm of
opposition among the older physicians, but for a time the unparalleled
success of Paracelsus in curing diseases more than offset his
unpopularity. Gradually, however, his bitter tongue and his coarse
personality rendered him so unpopular, even among his patients, that,
finally, his liberty and life being jeopardized, he was obliged to flee
from Basel, and became a wanderer. He lived for brief periods in Colmar,
Nuremberg, Appenzell, Zurich, Pfeffers, Augsburg, and several other
cities, until finally at Salzburg his eventful life came to a close in
1541. His enemies said that he had died in a tavern from the effects
of a protracted debauch; his supporters maintained that he had been
murdered at the instigation of rival physicians and apothecaries.

But the effects of his teachings had taken firm root, and continued
to spread after his death. He had shown the fallibility of many of the
teachings of the hitherto standard methods of treating diseases, and
had demonstrated the advantages of independent reasoning based on
observation. In his Magicum he gives his reasons for breaking with
tradition. "I did," he says, "embrace at the beginning these doctrines,
as my adversaries (followers of Galen) have done, but since I saw that
from their procedures nothing resulted but death, murder, stranglings,
anchylosed limbs, paralysis, and so forth, that they held most diseases
incurable.... therefore have I quitted this wretched art, and sought for
truth in any other direction. I asked myself if there were no such thing
as a teacher in medicine, where could I learn this art best? Nowhere
better than the open book of nature, written with God's own finger." We
shall see, however, that this "book of nature" taught Paracelsus some
very strange lessons. Modesty was not one of these. "Now at this time,"
he declares, "I, Theophrastus Paracelsus, Bombast, Monarch of the
Arcana, was endowed by God with special gifts for this end, that every
searcher after this supreme philosopher's work may be forced to imitate
and to follow me, be he Italian, Pole, Gaul, German, or whatsoever or
whosoever he be. Come hither after me, all ye philosophers, astronomers,
and spagirists.... I will show and open to you... this corporeal
regeneration."(1)

Paracelsus based his medical teachings on four "pillars"--philosophy,
astronomy, alchemy, and virtue of the physician--a strange-enough
equipment surely, and yet, properly interp