194). He
had the Hippocratic conception of the "vis medicatrix naturae"--no one
keener since the days of the Greeks. Man is his own doctor and finds
proper healing herbs in his own garden: the physician is in ourselves,
in our own nature are all things that we need: and speaking of wounds,
with singular prescience he says that the treatment should be defensive
so that no contingency from without could hinder Nature in her work
(Stoddart, p. 213).
Paracelsus expresses the healing powers of nature by the word "mumia,"
which he regarded as a sort of magnetic influence or force, and he
believed that anyone possessing this could arrest or heal disease
in others. As the lily breaks forth in invisible perfume, so healing
influences may pass from an invisible body. Upon these views of
Paracelsus was based the theory of the sympathetic cure of disease
which had an extraordinary vogue in the late sixteenth and seventeenth
centuries, and which is not without its modern counterpart.
In the next century, in Van Helmont we meet with the Archaeus everywhere
presiding, controlling and regulating the animate and inanimate bodies,
working this time through agents, local ferments. The Rosicrucians had
their direct inspiration from his writings, and such mystics as the
English Rosicrucian Fludd were strong Paracelsians.
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