Medieval Biology. The Transition

By the early decades of the 1500s, Europe had surged back from the darkness and had reached the limits of Greek biology (and of Greek science in general, in fact). The movement could not progress further, however, unless the scholars of Europe could be made to realize that the Greek books were but a beginning. They had to be discarded, once mastered, and not kept and revered until they became prison walls of the mind. The work of Mondino illustrates how difficult it was to break away from the ancients and move beyond.

Perhaps it took a half-mad boaster to make the break and serve as a living transition to modem times. The one who did so was a Swiss physician named Theophrastus Bombastus von Hohenheim (1493-1541). His father taught him medicine and he himself had a roving foot and a receptive mind. He picked up a great many remedies on his travels that were not known to his stay-at-home contemporaries, and made himself out to be a marvelously learned physician.

He was interested in alchemy, which Europeans had picked up from the Arabs who had, in turn, picked it up from the Alexandrian Greeks. The ordinary alchemist was (when not an outright faker) the equivalent of the modem chemist, but the two most startling goals of alchemy were will-o'-the-wisps never destined to be achieved—at least not by alchemical methods.

Alchemists attempted, first, to find methods of transmuting base metals, such as lead, to gold. Secondly, they sought what was commonly known as the "philosopher's stone"—a dry material supposed by some to be the medium for transmuting metals to gold, and by others to be a universal cure, an elixir of life that was the clue even to immortality.

Hohenheim saw no point in trying to make gold. He believed that the true function of alchemy was to aid the physician in the cure of disease. For this reason, he concentrated on the philosopher's stone which he claimed he had discovered. (He did not hesitate to assert that he would live forever as a result, but, alas, he died before he was fifty of an accidental fall.)

Hohenheim's alchemical leanings led him to look to mineral sources for his cures-minerals being the stock in trade of alchemy—and to scorn the botanical medicines that were so in favor with the ancients. He inveighed furiously against the ancients. Celsus' works had just been translated and were the bible of European physicians, but Hohenheim called himself "Paracelsus" ("better than Celsiis") and it is by that vainglorious name that he is known to posterity.

Paracelsus was town physician in Basel in 1527, and to show his opinions as publicly as possible, he burnt copies of the books of Galen and Avicenna in the town square. As a result, his conservative enemies among the medical profession maneuvered him out of Basel, but that did not change his opinions. Paracelsus did not destroy Greek science, or even Greek biology, but his attacks had drawn the attention of scholars.

His own theories were not much better than the Greek theories against which he railed so furiously, but it was a time when iconoclasm was necessary- and valuable in itself. His loud irreverence against the ancients could not help but shake the pillars of orthodox thought and although Greek science kept its stranglehold on the European mind for a while longer, the hold was weakening perceptibly.