Page:The growth of medicine from the earliest times to about 1800.djvu/448

 people with whom I associated in my youth I am not of a finely-spun texture We were not nourished with figs and white bread, but with cheese, milk and black bread-food that does not make delicate lads They say of me that I lead the people astray, that I am possessed of a devil, that I am a sorcerer, and that I am a magician. Whatever truth there may be in these charges, one thing is certain: You are all of you unworthy to unloose the latchets of my shoes." (From Paragranum, II., 120.)

Oporinus, who acted for a long time as Paracelsus' assistant, made the following statements with regard to some of the methods of his former master:—

He always kept several preparations stewing on his furnace—as, for example, a sublimate of oil or of arsenic, a mixture of saffron and iron, or his marvelous Opedeldoch. He never prescribed a special diet nor any hygienic measures. As a purge he gave a precipitate of theriaca or of mithridate, or simply the juice of cherries or grapes, in the form of granules (about the size of the droppings of mice), and he was careful always to give them in uneven numbers (1, 3, or 5). He was bitterly opposed to the polypharmacy which prevailed so widely in his day.

Cabanès says that we probably owe to Paracelsus an increased knowledge of the virtues possessed by the different preparations of antimony, mercury and iron, and by salines. It was he who created the distinction between officinal and magistral preparations. To our list of pharmaceutical preparations, he added tincture of hellebore, compound tincture of aloes, digestive ointment, the tincture of metals ("Lilium" of Paracelsus), the "Saffron of Mars," etc. He was the inventor of the precious preparation known as "la mumie," a preparation which was popularly believed to possess marvelous healing powers. Ambroise Paré, toward the end of his career, was greatly blamed because he did not employ this remedy, and he was finally compelled in self-defense to write a pamphlet on the subject. (The text is reprinted in Malgaigne's "Ambroise Paré," under the title of "Traité de la mumie et de la licorne.")