Paracelsus : the reformer of medicine / by Edward Berdoe.

  • Berdoe, Edward, 1836-1916.
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 Surgeons of England. The original may be consulted at The Royal College of Surgeons of England.

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    I prepared out of some vital substance that will attract vitality. Mesmer, who lived nearly 300 years after him, reaped the glory of a (jiscovery made, as Lessing says, by the martyred fire-philosopher who -died in Salzburg hospital. From this study of a soul Mr. Browning evidently desires us to 1 learn at least one great lesson—that neither the intellect without the i heart nor the heart without the intellect will avail for the highest service of man by his brother. We are just beginning to learn that the Gospel of the Carpenter's Son is a life to be lived, not a mere i creed to be believed. I am not quite sure that Mr. Browning did well to point this moral from the life of his hero. He was only unloving and unlovable when combating the gross stupidity and bigoted ignorance of his brother doctors. He seems to have been in life and death the loving friend of the poor, to whom when he died he left all his goods. But the lesson of the union of heart and head is good to learn from any parable. Think of this. Just about the time of Paracelsus a company of heretics about to be burned at the stake were compelled to listen to a sermon from this text : If I give my body to be burned and have not charity, it profiteth me nothing, and probably the preacher really believed he was preaching the doctrines of Christ. Why has the Gospel of Love survived this per- verted systematic theology ] Because after all the human heart is stronger than the human head. There is a large and beautiful church in the Roman Campagna built on such a pestilential soil, so deadly in its effects on the atmo- sphere, that it can no longer be used for worship. Its marble pillars are entwined with luxuriant creepers, its cracked and crumbling monuments are garlanded with lovely southern flowers, lilies and roses grow out of its tombs, and the choir stalls, carved with quaint figures of demons and satyrs, are beds from which spring delicate mosses and fair ferns; the birds build their nests in the traceries of the beautiful storied windows, and the lizard sports on its marble walls, the bats haunt its dark recesses. A solitary monk, as a penance for past sins, says the daily mass before its moss-grown altar, at which no worshipper but himself dares to kneel. Yet the flowers breathe the pestilential atmosphere uninjured, and beautify the ruins on which they grow. ** Only gradually, says Professor Graetz, does religion become humanized. Had not human love, like these fair flowers, softened and adorned the grim and crumbling creations of a pseudo- scientific and dogmatic theology, religion would have long since lost its hold on modern man. To live to know alone is to miss life's end ; to live to love, for art and beauty and pleasantness alone,