The Devil's Doctor Quotes

“It is only rather recently that science has begun to make peace with its magical roots. Until a few decades ago, it was common for histories of science either to commence decorously with Copernicus's heliocentric theory or to laud the rationalism of Aristotelian antiquity and then to leap across the Middle Ages as an age of ignorance and superstition. One could, with care and diligence, find occasional things to praise in the works of Avicenna, William of Ockham, Albertus Magnus, and Roger Bacon, but these sparse gems had to be thoroughly dusted down and scraped clean of unsightly accretions before being inserted into the corners of a frame fashioned in a much later period.”
― Philip Ball, The Devil's Doctor: Paracelsus and the World of Renaissance Magic and Science

“Death is the midwife of very great things.... It brings about the birth and rebirth of forms a thousand times improved. This is the highest mystery of God.”
― Paracelsus, The Devil's Doctor: Paracelsus and the World of Renaissance Magic and Science

“No matter who you were in sixteenth-century Europe, you could be sure of two things: you would be lucky to reach fifty years of age, and you could expect a life of discomfort and pain. Old age tires the body by thirty-five, Erasmus lamented, but half the population did not live beyond the age of twenty. There were doctors and there was medicine, but there does not seem to have been a great deal of healing. Anyone who could afford to seek a doctor's aid did so eagerly, but the doctor was as likely to maim or kill as to cure. His potions were usually noxious and sometimes fatal—but they could not have been as terrible and traumatic as the contemporary surgical methods. The surgeon and the Inquisitor differed only in their motivation: otherwise, their batteries of knives, saws, and tongs for slicing, piercing, burning, and amputating were barely distinguishable. Without any anesthetic other than strong liquor, an operation was as bad as the torments of hell.”
― Philip Ball, The Devil's Doctor: Paracelsus and the World of Renaissance Magic and Science

“Hippocrates can be justifiably regarded as the father of Western medicine, and he stands in relation to this science as Aristotle does to physics. Which is to say, he was almost entirely wrong, but he was at least systematic.”
― Philip Ball, The Devil's Doctor: Paracelsus and the World of Renaissance Magic and Science

“The laws of physics apply to everything equally, to stars as well as flowers. Botany and astronomy are separate sciences, but if they are somehow fundamentally inconsistent then there is something wrong with our theories. The need for such an all-encompassing vision was not really felt in the Classical past. Aristotle wrote very widely and was happy enough to draw analogies between disparate phenomena, but he was conspicuously silent on some topics (such as what we would now call chemistry) and gives little impression of the need for congruence and continuity. For encyclopedists such as Pliny, "local" explanations for things were often enough: phenomena are explained largely in terms of themselves, not in terms of other things. Where do the four humors, the bodily fluids that were thought to govern health, come from? Neither Galen nor Hippocrates, the two preeminent physicians of antiquity, tell us; they assume that it is just how things are.”
― Philip Ball, The Devil's Doctor: Paracelsus and the World of Renaissance Magic and Science

“A so-called antimony war had been waged between French [Galenist] physicians and [alchemical, Paracelsian] iatrochemists since the beginning of the seventeenth century. What it lacked in bloodletting, this war made up for in bile.”
― Philip Ball, The Devil's Doctor: Paracelsus and the World of Renaissance Magic and Science

“The saints are in heaven, not in wood.
—De morbis ex incantationibus et impressionibus”
― Paracelsus, The Devil's Doctor: Paracelsus and the World of Renaissance Magic and Science

“I while yet a youth wrote in a quite large volume three books of magical things, which I called De occulta philosophia, in which whatever was then erroneous because of my curious youth, now, more cautious, I wish to retract by this recantation, for formerly I spent much time and goods on these vanities.”
― Cornelius Agrippa, The Devil's Doctor: Paracelsus and the World of Renaissance Magic and Science

“Scientists, according to [Francis] Bacon, should not be like ants, busy doing mindless practical tasks, nor like spiders, weaving tenuous philosophical webs, but like bees, mining nature for her goodness and using it to make useful things.”
― Philip Ball, The Devil's Doctor: Paracelsus and the World of Renaissance Magic and Science

“As modern science emerged, it did not banish the concept of occult forces; rather, it accommodated and formalized those that seemed useful, such as magnetism and gravity, relegating others--ghosts, telepathy, telekinesis, and so on--to a ragbag of outmoded notions that, in retaining the label "occult," gradually rendered the word disreputable. But without this belief in the occult, science would have been stymied. Before Renaissance magic stimulated a new interest in the occult, the forces of nature were dismissed as beyond man's capacity to understand. To Thomas Aquinas, magnetism is an "occult virtue which man is not capable of explaining.”
― Philip Ball, The Devil's Doctor: Paracelsus and the World of Renaissance Magic and Science

“Some say that the spiritual founder of the Rosicrucians was Paracelsus himself. In Huser's edition of his Prognostication Concerning the Next Twenty-four Years there is a woodcut of a child looking toward a heap of Paracelsus's books, some inscribed with a capital R and one bearing the word Rosa. But the significance of this imagery for the Rosicrucians seems spurious.* The rose that the secret society chose as its symbol is in fact derived from the emblem of Martin Luther, in which a heart and cross spring from the center of the flower. The movement began as a society of Protestant Paracelsians founded by the alchemist Johann Valentin Andreae of Herrenberg.

*The Paracelsus connection remains puzzling, however. In the first edition of the Philosophia Magna, published by Birckmann in 1567, the Hirschvogel woodcut of Paracelsus appears in modified form with various strange images in the background that later became clearly associated with Rosicrucianism, such as a child's head emerging from a cleft in the ground. What is the significance of these symbols, fifty years before the Rosicrucian movement came into the open?”
― Philip Ball, The Devil's Doctor: Paracelsus and the World of Renaissance Magic and Science

“We should not imagine that this means our fate is fixed by our planets, however. Even though each vital organ corresponds to a planet—the liver to Jupiter, the brain to the moon, the heart to the sun, the spleen to Saturn, the lungs to Mercury, the gallbladder to Mars, and the kidneys to Venus—yet the one is not governed by the other: "Saturn has nothing to do with the spleen, nor the spleen anything to do with Saturn." Rather, these correspondences are simply a manifestation of the cosmic mirror that makes man a microcosm of the universal macrocosm. The two are analogs but are not causally related. From a scale model of a building you can read the proportions and relationships of the building itself, but crushing the former does not raze the latter.”
― Philip Ball, The Devil's Doctor: Paracelsus and the World of Renaissance Magic and Science

“We watch Paracelsus in Basle as though seeing a man run headlong toward a precipice. Like an indestructible lunatic, he will do so again and again throughout his life.”
― Philip Ball, The Devil's Doctor: Paracelsus and the World of Renaissance Magic and Science

“Better still [than pure sugar] was the remedy known as theriac, the root of the English word 'treacle,' which was kept in ornate ceramic jars on the shelves of every self-respecting apothecary shop. The name comes from the Greek therion, meaning 'venomous animal,' for theriac was supposed in Classical times to counteract all venoms and poisons.”
― Philip Ball, The Devil's Doctor: Paracelsus and the World of Renaissance Magic and Science

“...a copy of his Ninty-five Theses, a formal declaration of his arguments against indulgences. This is the document that Luther is said to have nailed to the church door in Wittenberg on October 31, 1517. If it happened at all, it was not quite as dramatic as it sounds—this was not an uncommon way to distribute pamphlets and polemics, and the Theses, written in Latin, would not have been accessible to most of the lay townspeople. But the timing—on the eve of All Saints' Day—made the challenge auspicious, and the document was soon thereafter distributed in a German translation by a local printer.”
― Philip Ball, The Devil's Doctor: Paracelsus and the World of Renaissance Magic and Science

“Forty of Paracelsus's theological manuscripts still survive, as well as sixteen Bible commentaries, twenty sermons, twenty works on the Eucharist, and seven on the Virgin Mary. Half of these have never been properly edited, let alone printed in modern form. There is no question that Paracelsus thought long and hard about Christianity, and by styling himself a professor of theology (without, it seems, any official academic sanction) he implies that he regarded this component of his output to be the equal of his medical and chemical theories. That his role in the history of science and medicine has received far more attention than his theological oeuvre is, however, understandable and probably apt, for it cannot be said that he had much influence even on the religious debates of his day. In theology he never aspired to be a Luther, and that would in any case have been a futile aspiration for one so lacking in political acumen or the ability to foster disciples.”
― Philip Ball, The Devil's Doctor: Paracelsus and the World of Renaissance Magic and Science

“Peasants brought up on a tradition of superstitious magic could hardly be expected to distinguish between such ostensibly Christian rituals and the mumbled incantations of the local wizard. And so, to the discomfort of the priests, many came to regard elements of Christian devotion as simple magical spells. The Latin Mass was, after all, incomprehensible to the common people, so it already had the aspect of an occult formula. It came to be seen, like magic, as an essentially mechanical rite through which absolution was achieved by observing the correct procedures. In that case, there was no real need for faith.”
― Philip Ball, The Devil's Doctor: Paracelsus and the World of Renaissance Magic and Science

“In a world threatened by pain and death, stories of miracle workers are a psychological necessity, because the alternative is unmitigated horror and despair.”
― Philip Ball, The Devil's Doctor: Paracelsus and the World of Renaissance Magic and Science

“Bombast, an old Swabian name, has inevitably given rise to the idea that Paracelsus's bluster and arrogance lie at the root of the word "bombastic." One feels that it ought to be so, but it is not. Baum means "tree" in German (in the Swabian dialect it is rendered Bom), and Baumbast is the fibrous layer of a tree's bark. But in the sixteenth century "bombast" had also come to mean cotton padding, inappropriately derived from bombax, the medieval Latin name for the silkworm, and it is from this origin that the connotation of puffed up derives.”
― Philip Ball, The Devil's Doctor: Paracelsus and the World of Renaissance Magic and Science