The Devil's Doctor: Paracelsus and the World of Renaissance Magic and Science (Hardcover)

As a result, the word "occult" has a bad rap. But as Philip Ball points out in his knowledgeable new biography, many of the scientific ideas we accept today as facts are occult (meaning "hidden") "in the Renaissance sense" -- phenomena like gravity and electromagnetic fields, even though these are "no less occult than the astrological 'emanations' of a star."

Renaissance magic and science can be as baffling as a labyrinth in part because high magic, religion and science shared much common ground. Our own worldview finds that unified vision difficult to grasp. In a factual sense, at least, Ball demonstrates an exuberant command of the field. The Devil's Doctor, his life of Paracelsus, the innovative Renaissance magus, is very much a life in context. We learn about early mining technology, the history of chemistry, Renaissance education, metallurgy, alchemy, medicine, Neoplatonic and Hermetic doctrine, the traditions of Arabic science, the life of a military surgeon and the internecine warfare of the Italian city-states. We get miniature histories of cobalt and zinc and a beguiling account of the etymology of the word "alcohol." As for the amazing wanderings of Paracelsus himself, Ball tracks him with satellite-like precision all over the known world. To do this, you have to know the geography and history of the period inside out.

His hero is worth it. Born about 1493 near Einsiedeln, Switzerland, Philip Theophrastus Aureolus Bombast von Hohenheim -- also known as Paracelsus (meaning, "beyond Celsus," a prominent Roman doctor) -- was the son of an alchemist and physician who taught at a mining school. The verifiable details of his life are scant, but he seems to have grown up poor, was tutored by his father, educated at monastic schools, and studied medicine and chemistry at the universities of Tübingen, Ferrara and Vienna. As an army surgeon he also saw the world, serving throughout Europe, Russia and the Levant.

In 1527, he accepted the post of town doctor at Basel, and his reputation was quickly made when he saved the life of the famed publisher Johann Froben, whom local university physicians had given up for lost. Predictably, the town's medical establishment tried to marginalize him, but his lectures, based on experience rather than the authority of ancient texts, attracted large crowds. After being expelled as a troublemaker from Basel, he spent the remainder of his life on the move. Few of his voluminous writings were published during his lifetime, but his collected works, on topics ranging from astrology to the Virgin Mary, fill 10 quarto volumes. He died in Salzburg in 1541.

He was quite a character, quarrelsome and defiant, with eccentricities galore, and his scorn for the medical establishment was fierce. "In the most distant corner [of the world]," he once declared, "there will not be one of you on whom the dogs will not piss." As a natural philosopher, he accepted the four elements of Aristotle but postulated three principles -- sulfur, mercury and salt -- that by their nature command the form everything in the world assumes. By active principles, he meant something akin to essences or Platonic ideas. His medical remedies were thereby linked to "magic" in the highest sense.

At the same time, he was a practical pioneer. In surgery, he sensibly advocated "minimal intervention" such as "keeping the wound clean"; was the first to advocate chemotherapy (the use of chemical drugs); treated (successfully at times) syphilis, the plague, paralysis and chronic ulcers; recognized suicidal depression, obsession and hysterical blindness as forms of mental illness; linked the respiratory ailments of miners to their industrial environment; and insisted on the chemical examination of urine to diagnose disease. He also understood that in administering remedies (mercury for syphilis, for example) more was often less: "The physician must remember that his medicines do not actually cure in themselves; rather, they create the conditions that allow the body to heal itself." His greatest modern advance was to hypothesize independent pathogens as agents of disease, instead of ascribing sickness to an imbalance in the patients themselves.

His devotion to alchemy -- "purification by separation" with an inner meaning of self-transformation -- was also intimately connected to his medical research. In his view, alchemy was exemplified by the digestive system, which "knows how to make our flesh from what is good in food while rejecting what is bad." If the alchemy of digestion could "turn barley and turnips into flesh and blood, what might not be possible" in the alchemical lab?

Ball is a science writer of unusual curiosity and range -- his previous books include Bright Earth: Art and the Invention of Color and Life's Matrix: A Biography of Water -- but now and then the reader must tread with care. He suggests that astrology was ultimately subverted by close observation of the heavens -- in particular, by the recognition that comets reappear after predictable intervals. But the predictable recurrence of celestial events is one thing astrologers had no trouble accommodating to their divinatory schemes. Ball's secular bias also scants anything having to do with religious belief. Just as high magic can be seen as "a necessary self-delusion," so the belief in an all-knowing God who created an intelligible universe, he tells us, is related to an infantile impulse and "a way of rendering significance to human existence, and perhaps every culture since the beginning of the world has needed to do that." Such blithe condescension -- unworthy of this otherwise intelligent, well-written and learned book -- is best taken with a Paracelsian grain of salt.

Reviewed by Benson Bobrick
Copyright 2006, The Washington Post. All Rights Reserved.

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