(10) And men have oft grown old among their books
     To die case hardened in their ignorance.

     —­Paracelsus, Browning.

     (11) Anna M. Stoddart:  Life of Paracelsus, London, 1911, pp.
     95-96.

     (12) Browning’s Paracelsus, London, 1835, p. 206 (note).

This first great revolt against the slavish authority of the schools had little immediate effect, largely on account of the personal vagaries of the reformer—­but it made men think.  Paracelsus stirred the pool as had not been done for fifteen centuries.

Much more important is the relation of Paracelsus to the new chemical studies, and their relation to practical medicine.  Alchemy, he held, “is to make neither gold nor silver:  its use is to make the supreme sciences and to direct them against disease.”  He recognized three basic substances, sulphur, mercury and salt, which were the necessary ingredients of all bodies organic or inorganic.  They were the basis of the three principles out of which the Archaeus, the spirit of nature, formed all bodies.  He made important discoveries in chemistry; zinc, the various compounds of mercury, calomel, flowers of sulphur, among others, and he was a strong advocate of the use of preparations of iron and antimony.  In practical pharmacy he has perhaps had a greater reputation for the introduction of a tincture of opium—­labdanum or laudanum—­with which he effected miraculous cures, and the use of which he had probably learned in the East.

Through Paracelsus a great stimulus was given to the study of chemistry and pharmacy, and he is the first of the modern iatro-chemists.  In contradistinction to Galenic medicines, which were largely derived from the vegetable kingdom, from this time on we find in the literature references to spagyric medicines and a “spagyrist” was a Paracelsian who regarded chemistry as the basis of all medical knowledge.

One cannot speak very warmly of the practical medical writings of Paracelsus.  Gout, which may be taken as the disease upon which he had the greatest reputation, is very badly described, and yet he has one or two fruitful ideas singularly mixed with mediaeval astrology; but he has here and there very happy insights, as where he remarks “nec praeter synoviam locqum alium ullum podagra occupat."(13) In the tract on phlebotomy I see nothing modern, and here again he is everywhere dominated by astrological ideas—­“Sapiens dominatur astris.”

     (13) Geneva ed., 1658, Vol.  I, p. 613.

As a protagonist of occult philosophy, Paracelsus has had a more enduring reputation than as a physician.  In estimating his position there is the great difficulty referred to by Sudhoff in determining which of the extant treatises are genuine.  In the two volumes issued in English by Waite in 1894, there is much that is difficult to read and to appreciate from our modern standpoint.  In the book “Concerning Long Life” he confesses that his method and