A Brill Calendar: June 24

Few people saw European universities in the first half of the 16th century as agents of change.

When printed books were in their infancy, universities enjoyed secular and spritual authority; preservation of knowledge taking precedence over proposing new ideas and ideals. Most ‘Almae Matres’ had already celebrated their first centennial ‘Dies Natalis’ and established conventions in serving Church & State. Yet, all over northern Europe vagrant young men searched for great teachers and inspiring professors within scholarly communities at Basel, Cologne, Cracow, Heidelberg, Leipzig, Louvain, Tübingen, Vienna and Wittenberg, where Martin Luther had nailed his theses to the door of the Schlosskirche on October 31 1517, and three years later, burning the Papal Bull that threatened the learned monk with excommunication from the Christian flock.

It is seldom that two ominous happenings in religion are matched by two counterparts in medicine. On June 5 1527 Philippus Aureolus Theophrastus Bombastus von Hohenheim (1493 – 1541) nailed an announcement on the door of Basel University. The announcement stated that he would start and teach in German to each and everyone: not only to accredited members of the ‘Universitas Studiosorum’. Nineteen days later, on June 24 1527, surrounded by a cheering crowd in front of the university, this physician and alchemist, calling himself ‘Paracelsus’ (‘Beyond Celsus’, the great medical authority since Antiquity), burned the books of the Greek physician Galen and of Avicenna, the Arab healer.

The man who introduced chemistry in medicine, author of a ground-breaking book on surgery and healing all kinds of wounds, earned during his restless and extravagant life a notoriety all his own. When he died in September 1541, under a cloud of mystery in a Salzburg inn, scholarship and learning inherited a new archetype for the pursuit of knowledge, not encumbered by a surfeit of respect for ancient authority. When Paracelsus was born, in 1493, alchemists still tried to make gold; after him the neologism ‘chemotherapy’ emerged.