Paracelsus, a name coined for himself by Theophrastus Bombastus von Hohenheim, was apparently meant to imply that he was greater than Celsus; there is no good authority for further adding the names Philippus Aureolus. Paracelsus was the son of Wilhelm Bombast von Hohenheim, a physician at Einsiedeln, in the Swiss canton of Schwyz, and was born in 1490, 1491, or 1493 (it seems impossible to decide which). He owed his early education mainly to his father; went to Basel University at sixteen, but soon left to study alchemy and chemistry with Trithemius, Bishop of Würzburg; and next at the mines in Tyrol belonging to the Fugger family learned the physical properties of metals and minerals, and the disposition of rock strata, and began to realise that the observation of nature is of surpassingly greater value to the student than academic prelections or the lucubrations of the study. Here and in subsequent wanderings over great part of Europe he amassed a vast store of facts, learned the actual practice of medicine amongst various peoples, but lost all faith in scholastic disquisitions and disputations. He acquired no little fame as a medical practitioner, and on his return to Basel in 1526 received the appointment of town physician. He also lectured on medicine at the university, but defied academic tradition not merely by lecturing in German (not Latin), but by flouting at Galen and Avicenna—burning their books in public, it was affirmed—and denying all that was most firmly believed by the faculty.
Bitterness, backbiting, enmities soon rose and pursued him throughout the rest of his life, aggravated and justified in some measure by his own vanity, arrogance, and aggressiveness, as also by his intemperate habits. A dispute with the magistrates in 1528 led to his leaving Basel in haste; he wandered for more than a dozen years, visiting Colmar, Nuremberg, Zurich, Augsburg, and many other towns, but seldom sojourning more than a few months, and at last settled in 1541 under the protection of the archbishop at Salzburg. But he died on the 24th September of the same year—murdered by his enemies, said his friends; in consequence of a drunken debauch, said his enemies.
He is said to have written some 364 works, of which only some 230 were printed; and of these the critics only admit from ten (Marx) to twenty-four (Häser) as genuine, the others being by his followers the 'Paracelsists.' They were mainly written in Swiss-German, the Latin versions being by other hands. About a dozen were translated into English. The earliest printed work was Practica D. Theophrasti Paracelsi (Augsburg, 1529). Collected German editions appeared at Basel in 1589-91 (11 vols. 4to) and again in 1603-5 (4 vols. folio; re-issued 1618), Latin editions in 1603-5 (11 vols. 4to) and 1658 (Geneva, 3 vols. folio).
His system was based on a cosmogonic view of the universe, the disturbances in the economy of the human microcosm corresponding to and being determined by the movements of the all-embracing macrocosm. Repudiating the current pseudo-Aristotelianism, Paracelsus turned sympathetically to Neoplatonism and the Cabbala; but it seems difficult not to admit in him an element of pure charlatanism, as well as of mysticism. Unquestionably, however, his method and his influence tended in the direction of the immediate observation of nature, the discarding of antiquated theories, the encouragement of independent research, experiment, and innovation. He is not to be blamed for clinging like his age to Alchemy (q.v.); he certainly made some new chemical compounds, and applied chemical knowledge to improve pharmacy and therapeutics, and, in an empirical fashion, to revolutionise hitherto-bound medical methods.
See monographs by M. B. Lessing (1839), Marx (1842), Mook (Würzburg, 1876); the article MEDICINE; and the History of Medicine by Häser. There is an English Life of Paracelsus by Fr. Hartmann (1886); Browning's famous poem on Paracelsus is well known.