These fantastic notions permeate all the medical treatises of
Paracelsus. But every now and then there are indications of keen
insight which go some way towards explaining his success as a
physician; for it cannot be doubted that he did effect many remarkable
cures. His European fame was not won by mere boasting. His treatise,
_De Morbis ex Tartare oriundus_, is admittedly full of sound sense.
Some of his chemical observations are startling for their anticipations
of later discoveries. If there were no air, he says, all living beings
would die. There must be air for wood to burn. Tin, calcined, increases
in weight; some air is fixed on the metal. When water and sulphuric
acid attack a metal there is effervescence; that is due to the escape
of some air from the water. He calls metals that have rusted, dead.
Saffron of Mars (the peroxide) is dead iron. Verdigris is dead copper.
Red oxide of mercury is dead mercury. But, he adds, these dead metals
can be revivified, “reduced to the metallic state,” are his exact words
(and it is to be noted that he was the first chemist to employ the
term “reduce” in this sense), by means of coal. Elsewhere he describes
digestion as a solution of food; putrefaction as a transmutation. He
knew how to separate gold from silver by nitric acid. It is quite
certain that the writer of Paracelsus’s works was a singularly
observant and intelligent chemist. He had “a wolfish hunger after
knowledge,” says Browning.
“Have you heard,” wrote Gui Patin to a friend a hundred years after the
death of the famous revolutionary, “that ‘Paracelsus’ is being printed
at Geneva in four volumes in folio? What a shame that so wicked a book
should find presses and printers which cannot be found for better
things. I would rather see the Koran printed. It would not deceive so
many people. Chemistry is the false money of our profession.”