Paracelsus : the reformer of medicine / by Edward Berdoe.

Date:
[1888]
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Paracelsus : the reformer of medicine / by Edward Berdoe. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh. The original may be consulted at the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh.

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    His self-will, his dissatisfaction with his teachers, his mysterious promptings to gain knowledge in some original way, lead his friends, who represent the conservative type of mind, to implore him to stay at home. Stay with us ! Cast those hopes away And stay with us ! Man should be humble : you are very proud : And God, dethroned, has dreadful plagues for such ! But Paracelsus, though protesting that he is no misanthropist, declares that his vast longings urge him forward. Sorcery and magic do not content him as the means of penetrating the secrets of Nature ; he will leave the schools and henceforth be taught of God, Who summons me to be His organ. And so leaving the region of abstractions, fictions, visions, spectral hopes and fears, in the midst of which the intellect, as Mr. Symonds says, somnambulistically moved upon an unknown way, he goes forth from the little town of Einsiedeln, following the star gleam of truth, and hearing what he thinks to be the voice of God—because having heard it, go he must: Be sure they sleep not whom God needs, he says. Why not stay here and learn % they ask ; converse with the mighty dead, fill out their unfulfilled careers, take up their unsolved problems. Snatch the torch from the tired runners and bear it onward ! You will have no books in the desert, you will find no footprints in the caves where you will be the first visitor ! In the ruined cities where wisdom would not stay, in the ravaged towns which renounced her, Rejecting past example, practice, precept, Aidless 'mid these he thinks to stand alone! Yas ! He accepts all that: he says, I seemed to long At once to trample on, yet save mankind, To make some unexampled sacrifice In their behalf, to wring some wondrous good From heaven or earth for them, to perish winning Eternal weal in the act ; as who should dare Pluck out the angry thunder from its cloud, That, all its gathered flame discharged on him, No storm might threaten summer's azure sleep.