He was ready to oppose obedience to old
lights as if they were oracles from which one did not dare to differ.
Illustrious doctor smight be graduated from books, but books made not a
single physician.(10) Neither graduation, nor fluency, nor the knowledge
of old languages, nor the reading of many books made a physician, but
the knowledge of things themselves and their properties. The business
of a doctor was to know the different kinds of sicknesses, their
causes, their symptoms and their right remedies. This he would teach, for
he had won this knowledge through experience, the greatest teacher, and
with much toil. He would teach it as he had learned it, and his lectures
would be founded on works which he had composed concerning inward and
external treatment, physic and surgery."(11) Shortly afterwards, at
the Feast of St. John, the students had a bonfire in front of the
university. Paracelsus came out holding in his hands the "Bible of
medicine," Avicenna's "Canon," which he flung into the flames saying:
"Into St. John's fire so that all misfortune may go into the air with
the smoke." It was, as he explained afterwards, a symbolic act: "What
has perished must go to the fire; it is no longer fit for use: what is
true and living, that the fire cannot burn.
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