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Paracelsus has been called the father of modern chemistry and is legendary for his treatment of syphilis. This work argues that Paracelsus developed an understanding of the body as composed of two distinct sexes, revolutionizing early modern conceptions of the female body as an inversion of or flawed approximation of the male body.
In 1573, the alchemist Anna Zieglerin gave her patron, the Duke of Braunschweig-Wolfenbüttel, the recipe for an extraordinary substance she called the lion's blood. She claimed that this golden oil could stimulate the growth of plants, create gemstones, transform lead into the coveted philosophers' stone—and would serve a critical role in preparing for the Last Days. Boldly envisioning herself as a Protestant Virgin Mary, Anna proposed that the lion's blood, paired with her own body, could even generate life, repopulating and redeeming the corrupt world in its final moments. In Anna Zieglerin and the Lion's Blood, Tara Nummedal reconstructs the extraordinary career and historical afterlife of alchemist, courtier, and prophet Anna Zieglerin. She situates Anna's story within the wider frameworks of Reformation Germany's religious, political, and military battles; the rising influence of alchemy; the role of apocalyptic eschatology; and the position of women within these contexts. Together with her husband, the jester Heinrich Schombach, and their companion and fellow alchemist Philipp Sommering, Anna promised her patrons at the court of Wolfenbüttel spiritual salvation and material profit. But her compelling vision brought with it another, darker possibility: rather than granting her patrons wealth or redemption, Anna's alchemical gifts might instead lead to war, disgrace, and destruction. By 1575, three years after Anna's arrival at court, her enemies had succeeded in turning her from holy alchemist into poisoner and sorceress, culminating in Anna's arrest, torture, and public execution. In her own life, Anna was a master of self-fashioning; in the centuries since her death, her story has been continually refashioned, making her a fitting emblem for each new age. Interweaving the history of science, gender, religion, and politics, Nummedal recounts how one resourceful woman's alchemical schemes touched some of the most consequential matters in Reformation Germany.
"Disknowledge": knowing something isn't true, but believing it anyway. In Disknowledge: Literature, Alchemy, and the End of Humanism in Renaissance England, Katherine Eggert explores the crumbling state of learning in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Even as the shortcomings of Renaissance humanism became plain to see, many intellectuals of the age had little choice but to treat their familiar knowledge systems as though they still held. Humanism thus came to share the status of alchemy: a way of thinking simultaneously productive and suspect, reasonable and wrongheaded. Eggert argues that English writers used alchemy to signal how to avoid or camouflage pressing but discomfiting topics in an age of rapid intellectual change. Disknowledge describes how John Donne, George Herbert, Henry Vaughan, John Dee, Christopher Marlowe, William Harvey, Helkiah Crooke, Edmund Spenser, and William Shakespeare used alchemical imagery, rhetoric, and habits of thought to shunt aside three difficult questions: how theories of matter shared their physics with Roman Catholic transubstantiation; how Christian Hermeticism depended on Jewish Kabbalah; and how new anatomical learning acknowledged women's role in human reproduction. Disknowledge further shows how Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, and Margaret Cavendish used the language of alchemy to castigate humanism for its blind spots and to invent a new, posthumanist mode of knowledge: writing fiction. Covering a wide range of authors and topics, Disknowledge is the first book to analyze how English Renaissance literature employed alchemy to probe the nature and limits of learning. The concept of disknowledge—willfully adhering to something we know is wrong—resonates across literary and cultural studies as an urgent issue of our own era.
This book explores the importance of bodily fluids to the development of medical knowledge in the eighteenth century. While the historiography has focused on the role of anatomy, this study shows that the chemical analyses of bodily fluids in the Dutch Republic radically altered perceptions of the body, propelling forwards a new system of medicine. It examines the new research methods and scientific instruments available at the turn of the eighteenth century that allowed for these developments, taken forward by Herman Boerhaave and his students. Each chapter focuses on a different bodily fluid – saliva, blood, urine, milk, sweat, semen – to investigate how doctors gained new insights into physiological processes through chemical experimentation on these bodily fluids. The book reveals how physicians moved from a humoral theory of medicine to new chemical and mechanical models for understanding the body in the early modern period. In doing so, it uncovers the lives and works of an important group of scientists which grew to become a European-wide community of physicians and chemists.
"PROFESSOR STILLMAN explains the apparent mysticism of much of the teaching of Paracelsus by the fact that his great aim was to break the bonds of tradition and dogma by which medicine was held enchained, which he thought could only be done by the "Light of Nature" which included not only the study of natural objects by means of our hands and eyes but also the influence of the stars and other agencies usually regarded in his time as supernatural upon the life and health of man. The science of medicine rested according to Paracelsus on four pillars, philosophy (in which he included natural philosophy), astronomy (which included astrology), alchemy (meaning chemistry), and virtue (or righteousness). Instead of the four Aristotelian elements, earth, air, water, and fire, Paracelsus taught that there were three elements-mercury, the principle of liquidity or volatility; sulphur, the principle of combustibility; and salt, that principle which is permanent and resists the action of fire. Paracelsus attempted, as the ancients, to find an accordance between the macrocosm or universe, and the microcosm or man. Thus the macrocosm consisted of three worlds, the visible and tangible; the astral (or sidereal), the world of the heavenly bodies; and the celestial, or the divine and spiritual. Man, the microcosm, consisted of three corresponding spheres, the visible and tangible, that is, the fluids, organs, bones, etc.; the astral, the sensations, seeing, feeling, perception; and the celestial, the soul. "Stillman gives a most excellent exposition of the Paracelsian theory of disease, the five entities or "ens" which influence the health of man, and the "archaei" which situated in the various organs act as their directing force and regulate their functions. Paracelsus was a great believer in the healing power of nature: "In nature's battle against disease the physician is but the helper, who furnishes nature with weapons, the apothecary is but the smith who forges them. The business of the physician is therefore to give to nature what she needs for her battle-Nature is the physician." "Paracelsus strove to reform the medicine of his day but his efforts were marred by the arrogance with which he behaved. Some of his pages read like the compositions of a paranoiac. He heaps abusive epithets on the ancients as well as on his contemporaries, and continually asserts the vast extent of his knowledge over theirs. "Professor Stillman ranks very high the chemical achievements of Paracelsus, not so much for any epoch-making discovery as for their general importance in the introduction of chemical substances and methods into more general use: "By pointing out a rational and promising field for chemical activity and by his own successful application of chemically prepared remedies he inaugurated a movement which has continued without interruption and with increasing importance to the present day." The contributions of Paracelsus to practical medicine and surgery were quite considerable. He wrote much on syphilis and was the first to state that it might be inherited. He is said to have been the first to point out the relationship between cretinism and goiter. Instead of the customary treatment of wounds with plasters or poultices, he said: "Every wound heals itself if it is only kept clean." He advocated cleanliness, protection from dirt and "external enemies," and the regulation of the diet. "Professor Stillman's book contains a number of interesting illustrations. By those who have studied the life and writings of Paracelsus, it will be esteemed as a useful contribution to the literature. By those who have been awed by the difficulties in the way of a correct understanding of the character and work of this enigmatical being the book should be read, and we feel sure that by it they will be stimulated to further effort." -Annals of Medical History, Volume 3
This volume offers a revisionist interpretation of Paracelsus and Paracelsianism. It points to the need for a new historiographical approach to the man and his ideas, while demonstrating the value of seeing them in their totallity, as well as in their proper historical text.
History of science credits the Flemish physician, alchemist and philosopher Jan Baptist Van Helmont (1579-1644) for his contributions to the development of chemistry and medicine. Yet, as this book makes clear, focussing on Van Helmont's impact on modern science does not do justice to the complexity of his thought or to his influence on successive generations of intellectuals like Robert Boyle or Gottfried Leibniz. Revealing Van Helmont as an original thinker who sought to produce a post-Scholastic synthesis of religion and natural philosophy, Georgiana Hedesan reconstructs his ambitious quest for universal knowledge as it emerges from the text of the Ortus medicinae (1648). Published after Van Helmont's death by his son, the work can best be understood as a compilation of finished and unfinished treatises, the historical product of a life unsettled by religious persecution and personal misfortune. The present book provides a coherent account of Van Helmont's philosophy by analysing its main tenets. Divided into two parts, the study opens with a background to Van Helmont's concept of an alchemical Christian philosophy, demonstrating that his outlook was deeply grounded in the tradition of medical alchemy as reformed by Theophrastus von Hohenheim, called Paracelsus (1493-1541). It then reconstitutes Van Helmont's biography, while giving a historical dimension to his intellectual output. The second part reconstructs Van Helmont's Christian philosophy, investigating his views on God, nature and man, as well as his applied philosophy. Hedesan also provides an account of the development of Van Helmont's thought throughout his life. The conclusion sums up Van Helmont's intellectual achievement and highlights avenues of future research.
