The Devil's Doctor by Philip Ball

Author:Philip Ball
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Published: 2011-07-18T16:00:00+00:00

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At Colmar, Oporinus left his master, exhausted by his demands, and returned to Basle. Despite some attempts by biographers to cast this separation as acrimonious, there is no real evidence that the parting was other than friendly, and Paracelsus even gave to his former secretary a portion of his famous laudanum remedy. Oporinus became a man of fluctuating fortunes: married four times, his reputation as a scholar and printer apparently did not spare him from the persistent specter of debt. When Paracelsus’s posthumous fame began to grow, Oporinus deeply regretted having lent out the books of his former master and never getting them back.

For a time Paracelsus thrived in Colmar. He told Amerbach that he had quickly become busy with patients there, and Oporinus confirms how much Paracelsus was admired in the town. He was welcomed into the humanist circle of the town officials and befriended the town provost Hieronymus Boner and the magistrate Konrad Wickram. His commitments to clients and his chemical experiments did not prevent him from writing: he dedicated a book on syphilis, paralysis, boils, and agues to Boner in June, and another titled On Open and Visible Diseases to Wickram in July.

The relationship with Fries was less agreeable. Given the Colmar doctor’s Galenist inclinations and veneration of Avicenna, it was inevitable that the two would quarrel sooner or later. Fries’s astrological prediction for 1531 contains a jibe against physicians who reject the ancients and claim to teach a new kind of medicine, which was probably a barb meant for Paracelsus. In time he was to accuse his former guest of being a necromancer who did the devil’s work.

Paracelsus’s influential connections did not help him gain permanent residence in Colmar, for the authorities were aware of his checkered career and controversial ideas and would not extend the temporary permit required for residing in the town. Nor would they allow him to publish his book on syphilis. And so he had no option but to move on again, which he did sometime in the first half of 1529. He traveled to the Duchy of Württemberg, east of Alsace, and made his way to the small town of Esslingen, close to the ancient seat of his family at Hohenheim. The Bombasts still kept a house there, facing onto the meadow of St. Blaise. It stood empty and would suffice as a temporary lodging.

At least the place had a cellar where Paracelsus could install his furnace and alchemical equipment. Yet these were not happy days that he spent in the dark basement, slowly poisoning himself with the fumes from his experiments. In so small a town there were few patients who might pay for his services, and he always insisted that he treat the poor for free. He secured assistants, but they were not learned men—more probably vagrants and rogues with little interest in his work and teachings. Brueghel drew a vivid image of the kind of conditions under which Paracelsus must have labored, and the seventeenth-century

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