There was no thought of, no
desire for, change. But the revival of learning awakened in men at
first a suspicion and at last a conviction that the ancients had left
something which could be reached by independent research, and gradually
the paralytic-like torpor passed away.
(3) Miall: The Early Naturalists, London, 1912.
The sixteenth and seventeenth centuries did three things in
medicine--shattered authority, laid the foundation of an accurate
knowledge of the structure of the human body and demonstrated how its
functions should be studied intelligently--with which advances, as
illustrating this period, may be associated the names of Paracelsus,
Vesalius and Harvey.
PARACELSUS
PARACELSUS is "der Geist der stets verneint." He roused men against the
dogmatism of the schools, and he stimulated enormously the practical
study of chemistry. These are his great merits, against which must be
placed a flood of hermetical and transcendental medicine, some his own,
some foisted in his name, the influence of which is still with us.
"With what judgment ye judge it shall be judged to you again" is the
verdict of three centuries on Paracelsus. In return for unmeasured abuse
of his predecessors and contemporaries he has been held up to obloquy
as the arch-charlatan of history.
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