Page:Hermetic and Alchemical Writings of Paracelsus Vol I (IA cu31924092287121).djvu/19

Rh as a youth. This was a position of some importance, and it was offered him at the instance of Erasmus and Ecolampidus. "There, in his lectures, he professed internal medicine, denounced the antiquated systems of Galen and other authorities, and began his instruction by burning the works of these masters in a brass pan with sulphur and nitre. He created innumerable enemies by his arrogance and his innovations, but the value of his mineral medicines was proved by the cures which he performed. These cures only increased the hatred of his persecutors, and Paracelsus, with characteristic defiance, invited the faculty to a lecture, in which he promised to teach the greatest secret of medicine. He began by uncovering a dish which contained excrement. The doctors, indignant at the insult, departed precipitately, Paracelsus shouting after them: 'If you will not hear the mysteries of putrefactive fermentation, you are unworthy of the name of physicians.'" It will be easily understood that the Hermetic doctor did not long retain his professorship at Basle. He came into conflict with the municipal authorities, and a second time he was forced to flee the place. He betook himself once more to a wandering mode of life. In 1528 he proceeded to Colmar; in 1530 he is found at Nuremburg, in embroilment, as usual, with the medical faculty, by whom he was denounced as an impostor, but the tables were turned on his opponents after his successful treatment of several aggravated cases of elephantiasis. For the ten years succeeding this date there are no certain records of his movements; he commonly lodged at inns and other public places, still performing cures which were astonishing for the period, and, according to the accusations of his enemies, also drinking to excess. The testimony of Oporinus on this point is very clear, though it has been indignantly repudiated by some of his later defenders. In 1541 Paracelsus was invited by Archbishop Ernst to settle at Salzburg, and there, according to one account, he died on September 24 of the same year, but the manner of his death, like that of his birth, has been the subject of contradictory recitals. By an alternative statement it occurred on a bench at the kitchen fire in a Strasburg hostelry. One writer supposes the event to have been accelerated by a scuffle with assassins in the pay of the orthodox medical faculty.

There can be no doubt that Paracelsus obtained a wide, though not altogether a happy, reputation during the brief period of his turbulent life, and there is also no doubt that this was immeasurably increased after death.