It was from that work, he said, that he learnt what he knew:  from the study of nature and of facts.  He had heard all the learned doctors and professors; he had read all their books, and they could teach him nothing.  Medicine was his monarch, and no one else.  He declared that there was more wisdom under his bald pate than in Aristotle and Galen, Hippocrates and Rhasis.  And fact seemed to be on his side.  He reappeared in Germany about 1525, and began working wondrous cures.  He had brought back with him from the East an arcanum, a secret remedy, and laudanum was its name.  He boasted, says one of his enemies, that he could raise the dead to life with it; and so the event all but proved.  Basle was then the university where free thought and free creeds found their safest home; and hither OEcolampadius the reformer invited young Paracelsus to lecture on medicine and natural science.

It would have been well for him, perhaps, had he never opened his lips.  He might have done good enough to his fellow-creatures by his own undoubted powers of healing.  He cured John Frobenius, the printer, Erasmus’s friend, at Basle, when the doctors were going to cut his leg off.  His fame spread far and wide.  Round Basle and away into Alsace he was looked on, even an enemy says, as a new AEsculapius.

But these were days in which in a university everyone was expected to talk and teach, and so Paracelsus began lecturing; and then the weakness which was mingled with his strength showed itself.  He began by burning openly the books of Galen and Avicenna, and declared that all the old knowledge was useless.  Doctors and students alike must begin over again with him.  The dons were horrified.  To burn Galen and Avicenna was as bad as burning the Bible.  And more horrified still were they when Paracelsus began lecturing, not in the time-honoured dog-Latin, but in good racy German, which everyone could understand.  They shuddered under their red gowns and hats.  If science was to be taught in German, farewell to the Galenists’ formulas, and their lucrative monopoly of learning.  Paracelsus was bold enough to say that he wished to break up their monopoly; to spread a popular knowledge of medicine.  “How much,” he wrote once, “would I endure and suffer, to see every man his own shepherd—­his own healer.”  He laughed to scorn their long prescriptions, used the simplest drugs, and declared Nature, after all, to be the best physician—­as a dog, he says, licks his wound well again without our help; or as the broken rib of the ox heals of its own accord.

Such a man was not to be endured.  They hated him, he says, for the same reason that they hated Luther, for the same reason that the Pharisees hated Christ.  He met their attacks with scorn, rage, and language as coarse and violent as their own.  The coarseness and violence of those days seem incredible to us now; and, indeed, Paracelsus, as he confessed himself, was, though of gentle blood, rough and unpolished; and utterly, as one can see from his writings, unable to give and take, to conciliate—­perhaps to pardon.  He looked impatiently on these men who were (not unreasonably) opposing novelties which they could not understand, as enemies of God, who were balking him in his grand plan for regenerating science and alleviating the woes of humanity, and he outraged their prejudices instead of soothing them.