The flamboyant physician, chemist, teacher and vagabond who called himself Paracelsus was born in Switzerland with the name Philippus Aureolus Theophrastus Bombastus Von Hohenheim. His mother died when he was very young, and he moved to Villach in southern Austria with his impoverished physician, chemist father. As a bright young student he dreamed that he might some day discover how to transmute lead into gold, a long sought goal of the alchemists. He left home at the age of 14, and wandered through Europe visiting university after university. By the time he was 20, he is said to have attended the universities of Basel, Tübingen, Vienna, Wittenberg, Leipziq, Heidelberg and Cologne. He was highly critical of all of them. His opinions angered academics of his day, which is not hard to understand when it is noted that at one point he wrote that he wondered how "the high...