Ball, The Devil's Doctor

Ball, Philip. The Devil’s Doctor: Paracelsus and the World of Renaissance Magic and Science. New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2006.

Posterity has had mixed emotions about Philip Theophrastus Bombast von Hohenheim (1493-1541), known as Paracelsus. Philip Ball, in his introduction, presents a duel image of Paracelsus: scientists and historians have slandered his name with descriptions such as charlatan, madman, a drunk who wrote intoxicated, “atheist pig,” and “jackass,” who lived life “like a pig, looked like a coachman and took pleasure in the company of the loosest and lowest mob;” Romantic poets, such as Goethe, saw him as a “man of mechanical talents,” eulogizing him in poems, stories, and novels such as Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (14). While some of the criticisms are based in truth, these criticisms detract our ability to see Paracelsus in the development of modern science and medicine. In The Devil’s Doctor, Ball aims to understand what “the philosophers of that age really argued over, and to take the true temperature of the intellectual ferment during the era of Luther and the Counter-Reformation” through the examination of the life of Paracelsus (4). Although not a biography of him, the life of Paracelsus acts as a gateway to the debates, events, conflicts and changes happening throughout Europe. Ball hopes to show that the “birth of the modern world, these struggles tell us, was neither easy nor painless, but rather it was turbulent, confused, and violent” (14).

In his introduction, Ball compares Paracelsus to a prism: he “separates out for us, as it were, the paradoxes, the terrors, the tensions that existed among natural philosophy, religion, humanism, and politics” (4). Using this analogy, he divides his work into twenty chapters, following the life and times of Paracelsus from his birth in the Swiss canton of Schwyz, his education and travels throughout Europe, and his career as a military surgeon, to his career in medicine, magic and the occult, and alchemy. Although the chapters progress chronologically, they also act as a springboard to examine the political, religious, philosophic, and scientific changes occurring throughout Europe. For example, chapter four, “The Staff and the Snake,” parallels themes of medicine, anatomy, political conflict, warfare, and education during Paracelsus’ time at university in Italy. During this time period, to become a doctor of medicine, one had to simply study the works of past masters such as Hippocrates and Galen and “follow their recommendations. The physician’s proper place was in the library, not in the surgery [room]” (52).

What set Paracelsus apart from conventional doctors, who “took their methods from ancient sources and learned them from books, [his] medicine drew on the occult [hidden] forces of nature, and it was acquired by practical experience: ‘The art of healing comes from nature, not from the physician’” (49). In anatomy, students did not examine cadavers to obtain knowledge of the human body―doctors read a book by Galen or Avicenna, reading “out the ancient knowledge while some menial surgeon provides illustration by opening up the body” (66). Ball refers to I. Galdston to demonstrate how his approach differed from that of his contemporaries: “It is the living body that teaches the anatomist health and disease not the dead one: he required therefore a living anatomy” (69). Therefore, after becoming a doctor of medicine, he travelled throughout Europe and beyond, to learn the art of healing by scrutinizing nature in all its aspects. Since the “specific attributes of each region shape its own medicine...so the occult forces on which the physician draws vary from place to place” (77). The common people that Paracelsus encountered throughout his travels knew there was a big difference between prayer and spells: a prayer was a plea God might grant or refuse, but a spell, if the incantation was conducted properly, was guaranteed to work. “Magic was regarded as a mechanical process, a matter of pushing the occult buttons of nature” (80). Ball refers to the historian Wayne Shumaker’s extreme claim of what many histories of science have neglected: “what the Renaissance called magic was a more nearly direct ancestor of true science than either of the dominant philosophies, Aristotelianism and Platonism” (10-11).

Through this work, Ball’s aim to place Paracelsus and the study of medicine back into the historiography of the Scientific Revolution has succeeded. In Paracelsus’ writings and published works can be found many fine ideas, such as “an ‘alchemist’ works inside us,...that diseases have chemical cures, that biochemistry, geochemistry, and industrial chemistry all operate according to the same rules” (343). However, there are many other parts that are either false as well as much gibberish. Since he made no major discovery that is a recognized part of modern science, like Copernicus or Newton did, he is remembered for “the thankless task of preparing for the hegemony of science...[his] works provided the defining framework for a good deal of the practice and theory that was evolving into modern science” (346). The life and work of Paracelsus is symbolic of the whole development of modern science and medicine: the ideas and writings of Copernicus and Vesalius that shaped the sixteenth century scientific reformation did not “simply spring in fledgling form into [their] minds and their ink” (7).