Page:The growth of medicine from the earliest times to about 1800.djvu/447

 he published three books of his "Paramirum." Then in 1535 he once more resumed his wandering life, in the course of which he visited Poland, Lithuania, Illyria, etc. On reaching Salzburg, in Austria, he fell ill and died on September 24, 1541, at the age of forty-eight.

Paracelsus was a prolific writer. To all the treatises which he published he gave extravagant titles. To his principal work, for example, he gave that of "Paramirum"—The Surprising Marvel; to another, that of "Paragranum"—Grain of Superior Quality; and to a third, that of "Archidoxia,"—Transcendental Science. He wrote treatises on syphilis, on the plague, on epidemics, on the diseases of grave-diggers, on ore-smelters, etc. It is admitted by all his critics that he devoted altogether too much time and thought to alchemy, demonology, necromancy, etc. Cabanès quotes Cruveilhier as saying that Paracelsus believed in the reality of beings of a fantastic nature, but attached little or no importance to them. Then Cabanès himself adds: "The thing which more than anything else absorbed his thoughts was the irresistible desire to overthrow the Galenic idol and substitute for it the science of experience, of observation pure and simple." Bordes-Pagès, another distinguished French physician, says of this extraordinary man: "The great glory of Paracelsus is to be found in the facts that he cast off the yoke of a former epoch, more speculative than practical; that he summoned physicians to resume their allegiance to experience; and that he opened a long career for the alchemists, upon whom he urged the duty thenceforward of making new remedies the principal object of their researches He simplified and spiritualized therapeutics." Some of Paracelsus' own sayings are worth preserving: "Without air all living creatures would perish from suffocation." "Man is the supreme animal, the one last created." "Alterius non sit, qui suus esse potest" [He who is able to be his own master should not allow himself to be led blindly by another]. When he was accused of being coarse-grained and of deceiving the people, he replied: "By nature and also owing to the kind of