various writings. He thus visited in succession Colmar, Nuremberg, Appenzell, Zurich, Pfäffers, Augsburg, Villach, Meran, Middelheim and other places, seldom staying a twelvemonth in any of them. In this way he spent some dozen years, till 1541, when he was invited by Archbishop Ernst to settle at Salzburg, under his protection. After his endless tossing about, this seemed a promise and place of repose. It proved, however, to be the complete and final rest that he found, for after a few months he died, on the 24th of September. The cause of his death, like most other details in his history, is uncertain. His enemies asserted that he died in a low tavern in consequence of a drunken debauch of some days’ duration. Others maintain that he was thrown down a steep place by some emissaries either of the physicians or of the apothecaries, both of whom he had during his life most grievously harassed. He was buried in the churchyard of St Sebastian, but in 1752 his bones were removed to the porch of the church, and a monument of reddish-white marble was erected to his memory.
The first book by Paracelsus was printed at Augsburg in 1529. It is entitled Practica D. Theophrasti Paracelsi, gemacht auff Europen, and forms a small quarto pamphlet of five leaves. Prior to this, in 1526–1527, appeared a programme of the lectures he intended to deliver at Basel, but this can hardly be reckoned a specific work. During his lifetime fourteen works and editions were published, and thereafter, between 1542 and 1845, there were at least two hundred and thirty-four separate publications according to Mook’s enumeration. The first collected edition was made by Johann Huser in German. It was printed at Basel in 1589–1591, in eleven volumes quarto, and is the best of all the editions. Huser did not employ the early printed copies only, but collected all the manuscripts which he could procure, and used them also in forming his text. The only drawback is that rather than omit anything which Paracelsus may have composed, he has gone to the opposite extreme and included writings with which it is pretty certain Paracelsus had nothing to do. The second collected German edition is in four volumes folio, 1603–1605. Parallel with it in 1603 the first collected Latin edition was made by Palthenius. It is in eleven volumes quarto, and was completed in 1605. Again, in 1616–1618 appeared a reissue of the folio German edition of 1603, and finally in 1658 came the Geneva Latin version, in three volumes folio, edited by Bitiskius.
The works were originally composed in Swiss-German, a vigorous speech which Paracelsus wielded with unmistakable power. The Latin versions were made or edited by Adam von Bodenstein, Gerard Dorn, Michael Toxites and Oporinus, about the middle of the 16th century. A few translations into other languages exist, as of the Chirurgia magna and some other works into French, and of one or two into Dutch, Italian and even Arabic. The translations into English amount to about a dozen, dating mostly from the middle of the 17th century. The original editions of Paracelsus’s works are getting less and less common; even the English versions are among the rarest of their class. Over and above the numerous editions, there is a bulky literature of an explanatory and controversial character, for which the world is indebted to Paracelsus’s followers and enemies. A good deal of it is taken up with a defence of chemical, or, they were called, “spagyric,” medicines against the attacks of the supporters of the Galenic pharmacopoeia.
The aim of all Paracelsus’s writing is to promote the progress of medicine, and he endeavours to put before physicians a grand ideal of their profession. In his attempts he takes the widest view of medicine. He bases it on the general relationship which man bears to nature as a whole; he cannot divorce the life of man from that of the universe; he cannot think of disease otherwise than as a phase of life. He is compelled, therefore, to rest his medical practice upon general theories of the present state of things; his medical system—if there is such a thing— is an adaptation of his cosmogony. It is this latter which has been the stumbling-block to many past critics of Paracelsus, and unless its character is remembered it will be the same to others in the future. Dissatisfied with the Aristotelianism of his time, Paracelsus turned with greater expectation to the Neoplatonism which was reviving. His eagerness to understand the relationship of man to the universe led him to the Kabbala, where these mysteries seemed to be explained, and from these unsubstantial materials he constructed, so far as it can be understood, his visionary philosophy. Interwoven with it, however, were the results of his own personal experience and work in natural history and chemical pharmacy and practical medicine, unfettered by any speculative generalizations, and so shrewd an observer as Paracelsus was must have often felt that his philosophy and his experience did not agree with one another.
Some of his doctrines are alluded to in the article Medicine (q.v.), and it would serve no purpose to give even a brief sketch of his views, seeing that their influence has passed entirely away, and that they are of interest only in their place in a general history of medicine and philosophy. Defective, however, as they may have been, and unfounded in fact, his kabbalistic doctrines led him to trace the dependence of the human body upon outer nature for its sustenance and cure. The doctrine of signatures, the supposed connexion of every part of the little world of man with a corresponding part of the great world of nature, was a fanciful and false exaggeration of this doctrine, but the idea carried in its train that of specifics. This led to the search for these, which were not to be found in the bewildering and untested mixtures of the Galenic prescriptions. Paracelsus had seen how bodies were purified and intensified by chemical operations, and he thought if plants and minerals could be made to yield their active principles it would surely be better to employ these than the crude and unprepared originals. He had besides arrived by some kind of intuition at the conclusion that the operations in the body were of a chemical character, and that when disordered they were to be put right by counter operations of the same kind. It may be claimed for Paracelsus that he embraced within the idea of chemical action something more than the alchemists did. Whether or not he believed in the philosopher’s elixir is of very little consequence. If he did, he was like the rest of his age; but he troubled himself very little, if at all, about it. He did believe in the immediate use for therapeutics of the salts and other preparations which his practical skill enabled him to make. Technically he was not a chemist; he did not concern himself either with the composition of his compounds or with an e.xplanation of what occurred in their making. If he could get potent drugs to cure disease he was content, and he worked very hard in an empirical way to make them. That he found out some new compounds is certain; but not one great and marked discovery can be ascribed to him. Probably, therefore, his positive services are to be summed up in this wide application of chemical ideas to pharmacy and therapeutics; his indirect and possibly greater services are to be found in the stimulus, the revolutionary stimulus, of his ideas about method and general theory. It is most difficult to appreciate aright this man of fervid imagination, of powerful and persistent convictions, of unbated honesty and love of truth, of keen insight into the errors (as he thought them) of his time, of a merciless will to lay bare these errors and to reform the abuses to which they gave rise, who in an instant offends us by his boasting, his grossness, his want of self-respect. It is a problem how to reconcile his ignorance, his weakness, his superstition, his crude notions, his erroneous observations, his ridiculous influences and theories, with his grasp of method, his lofty views of the true scope of medicine, his lucid statements, his incisive and epigrammatic criticisms of men and motives.
See Marx, Zur Würdigung des Theophrastus von Hohenheim (Göttingen, 1842); Mook, Theophrastus Paracelsus, eine kritische Studie (Würzburg, 1876); Hartman, Life of P. T. Paracelsus (London, 1887); Schubert und Sudhoff, Paracelsus-Forschungen (Frankfurt a.M., 1887–1889); Sudhoff, Versuch einer Kritik der Echtheit der Paracelsischen Schriften (Berlin, 1894); Waite, The Hermetic and Alchemical Writings of Paracelsus (London, 1894).
PARACHUTE (from Ital. parare, to shield, protect; cf.
“parasol,” “parapet,” and Fr. chute, a fall), an instrument
more or less resembling a large umbrella, which by the resistance
it offers to the air enables an aeronaut attached to it to descend
safely from a balloon or flying machine in the air. The principle
of the parachute is so simple that the idea must have occurred
to persons in all ages. Simon de la Loubère (1642–1729), in his
History of Siam (Paris, 1691), tells of a person who frequently
diverted the court by the prodigious leaps he used to take,
having two parachutes or umbrellas fastened to his girdle. In
1783 Sébastien Lenormand practically demonstrated the efficiency
of a parachute by descending from the tower of Montpellier
observatory; but he merely regarded it as a useful means
whereby to escape from fire. To J. P. Blanchard (1753–1809)
is due the idea of using it as an adjunct to the balloon. As
early as 1785 he had constructed a parachute to which was
attached a basket. In this he placed a dog, which descended
safely to the ground when the parachute was released from a
balloon at a considerable elevation. It is stated that he
descended himself from a balloon in a parachute in 1793; but,
owing to some defect in its construction he fell too rapidly, and
broke his leg. André Jacques Garnerin (1769–1823) was the first
person who successfully descended from a balloon in a parachute,
and he repeated this experiment so often that he may be said
to have first demonstrated the practicability of using the
machine, though his elder brother, J. B. O. Garnerin (1766–1849),
also claimed a share in the merit of perfecting it. In 1793 he
was taken prisoner at Marchiennes, and while in captivity at
Bude (Budapest) thought out the means of descending from a
balloon by means of a parachute. His first public experiment
was made on the 22nd of October 1797. He ascended from the
park of Monceau, at Paris, and at the height of about 114 m. he
