Photo by Linda Dear

What do you do when you find a bluish lump of fungus previously unknown to science, growing in your petri dish? If you’re Steven Pollock, you eat it, call your friend, and tell him you’ve discovered the one thing that’s eluded men of obscurity for millennia. I am talking of course about the philosopher’s stone—key to the universe—elixir of life—the ultimate essence of all things. In suburban San Antonio of all places. But there’s one quality the Ancients forgot—it gets you really, really high.¹

On first blush, mad scientists and mushrooms don’t appear to have much in common. Mad scientists are reason’s burnt offering to the gods of insanity—twisted caricatures of own hubris, doomed eternally to hollows of our brains.

Mushrooms are a tasty food.

But there is a darkness within the mushroom. An evil that, if left unchecked, can consume the very person that tries to eat it.

Yes they may look cute all bunched up in the produce aisle. But don’t be a fool. The wrong mushroom can kill you. Once you’re dead, others still feast off your flesh. They can warp your mind into insanity. And, in the case of 1970s physician and mycologist Steven Pollock—they can even get you murdered.²

What’s a mycologist? You ask slack-jawed. Loosely put, mycologists study fungi. I say loosely because fungi have found their way into literally every realm of human experience. From pretentious Italian cookery to cancer treatment in canines to obscure tribal ritual, you’d be hard pressed to find anything that mycologists don’t stick their noses in. Noses which, like most parts of the human body, are covered in hungrily munching fungal colonies.³

You might be surprised to know that much of what we cherish and hold dear are in fact mushrooms. Ethnomycologist James Arthur has boldly declared that Santa Claus is a mushroom clad stoned shaman from Siberia.⁴ John Allegro argues that Jesus Christ himself, despite appearances, was in fact a mushroom sacrament, ingested by a secret Judaic fertility cult whose scripture inadvertently gave rise to modern Christianity.⁵

Pollock believed that many modern medical treatments could effectively be replaced by mushrooms, psychedelic mushrooms to be precise.⁶ While his facial hair suggests a nudist colony off the Puget Sound, or maybe even an obscure Ben and Jerry’s flavor made with beard chunks and thick-rimmed glasses, the San Antonio based doctor had his sights set firmly on the mainstream medical establishment.

By the late 70s, natural medicine was quickly going mainstream, and there are few natural medical compounds more psychoactive than psilocybin, shroom’s active ingredient.

Does this red and white mushroom account for the origins of Santa Claus?

With medical marijuana gaining a grudging legal acceptance, Pollock believed it was only a matter of time before Uncle Sam would wise up to the benefits of medical mushrooms. And when he did, the doctor would be first to the party, satchel of Psilocybin ℞ in one hand, a bestselling hardcover in the other.

He wrote extensively in publications like the Journal of Psychedelic Drugs on the potential of shrooms to treat illness and improve overall life quality.^6,7,8 And yes the Journal of Psychedelic Drugs is a real scientific journal—you have to respect a publication that lets a sentence like, “I felt as if I were perceiving stimuli traveling through multifocal space warps,”⁹ go to print.

At the same time, Pollock drew up plans for a multimillion dollar mushroom research center to conduct his own clinical studies.¹ A facility that he hoped to finance, naturally, with magic mushrooms.¹

Under the name Hidden Creek, “the magic mushroom people who are forever keeping your mind in mind,” Pollock sold ready-made magic mushroom grow kits in the back pages of High Times.¹⁰ His unrivaled cultivation skills and bizarre marketing acumen gave magazine readers such evocative products as Hawaiian Cyan, The Cosmic Camote, and Penis Envy (the latter bred specifically to look like a penis).^{10, 11}

The whole thing was actually legit. Magic mushroom spores don’t contain any psychoactive compounds, so not technically illegal to sell them. Of course, you’ll need plenty of mushrooms to create the spores. Which explains why Pollock had, according to one source, “the world’s largest collection of psychedelic mushrooms.”² After his murder police seized 1,758 jars of mushrooms and growing mediums from his modest ranch-style suburban home.²

Hidden Creek was a considerable success,¹ thanks largely to Pollock’s relentless obsession. According to his girlfriend, “We hardly ever went out…Our dates were spent shaking mushroom jars early into the morning, and the sex was often interrupted by technical raps about mushrooms.”²

But still, grow kits weren’t raising the kind of money needed to finance Pollock’s vision. So the good doctor turned to the next best thing—selling narcotic prescriptions for cash out of his home.²

Now here’s where things get really hairy. It seems Pollock’s erratic behavior was quickly pissing off a whole lot of people. Friends and colleagues broke contact.¹ Five separate government agencies took an interest in his activities.² And it didn’t help that he started a cannabis plantation, prescribed Dexedrine to two undercover cops, and purchased a pharmacy to fill his own ‘scrips.¹

Pollock's notorious Penis Envy strain

What we do is that Steven Pollock was shot dead “execution style” in his house on January 31st, 1981.²

I won’t go into the details of Pollock’s brutal murder, which to this day remains a mystery. Was it just a simple robbery as police claim? Or was it a clandestine coup aimed to keep psychedelics out of the medical establishment. You can check out Hamilton Morris’s excellent article in Harpers for more info on the crime itself. Suffice to say there’s enough conspiracy to make your propeller beanie whiz uncontrollably in alarm, with unsubstantiated rumors and hearsay stretching all the way up to the big Texan himself—Ross Perot.¹

“Had Steve worn a tie, had short hair, worked under a government grant at Harvard and sold prescriptions to suburbanites,” colleague Kenneth Blum attests, “He would still be alive today.”² If so, would Pollock’s dream of a mushroom stocked pharmacy on every main street have come to pass?

Thirty-plus years later, and medicinal magic mushrooms still just sound funny, despite psilocybin’s promise in the treatment of anything from obsessive compulsive disorder, to cigarette addition, to headaches. But Pollock’s philosopher’s stone fungus (P. Tampenensis)¹¹ lives on, in the Netherlands of all places, where thanks to a legal loophole it is widely sold under the less arcane moniker, Magic Truffles.¹

True mad science after all is never eradicated. Just when you think history has blotted out any last trace, it pops up in the shelves of an Amsterdam smart shop.

From a '79 issue of High Times.

Sources:
1. Morris, M. (2013, July). Blood spore: Of murder and mushrooms. Harper’s Magazine, 41 – 56. Retrieved from: http://harpers.org/archive/2013/07/blood-spore/
2. Fellner, M. (1980). ’Shroom king slain in his San Antonio home. High Times.
3. Krom, B. P., Kidwai, S., ten Cate, J. M. (2014). Candida and other fungal species: Forgotten players of healthy oral microbiota. Journal of Dental Research, 93(5), 445 – 451.
4. Arthur, J. (2003). Mushrooms and mankind: The impact of mushrooms on human consciousness and religion. San Diego, California: The Book Tree.
5. Allegro, J. M. (1970). The sacred mushroom and the cross. Garden City, New York: Doubleday & Company, Inc.
6. Pollock, S. H. (1976). Psilocybin mycetismus with a special reference to the Panaeolus. Journal of Psychedelic Drugs, 8(1), 43 – 57.
7. Pollock, S. H. (1975). The Psilocybin Mushroom Pandemic. Journal of Psychedelic Drugs, 7(1), 73 – 84.
8. Pollock, S. H. (1976). Liberty caps: Recreational hallucinogenic mushrooms. Drug and Alcohol Dependence, 1(6), 445 – 447.
9. Pollock, S. H. (1974). A case study from Hawaii. Journal of Psychedelic Drugs, 6(1), 85 – 89.
10. Hidden Creek [advertisement]. (1979). High Times. Retrieved From: http://www.mushroomjohn.org/cult150.html
11. Morris, M. (2009). A nice, thick, uncut, 12-inch shroom. Vice Magazine, 16(2). Retrieved from: http://www.vice.com/print/12-inch-shroom-603-v16n2
12. Guzmán, G., & Pollock, S. H. (1978). A new bluing species of psilocybe from Florida, U.S.A. Mycotaxon, 7(2), 373 – 376.

The post Mad Scientist #18: Steven H. Pollock appeared first on Mad Scientist Blog.

Fateful apple falls from a tree and bonks young Isaac Newton on the head. Newton has an epiphany (and presumably a heart-healthy snack).

Why, he wonders, should objects always fall down. Why not up? Or sideways? Or in some crazy, unrealistic corkscrew fashion? Then it hits him: Maybe the apple didn’t just fall. Maybe it was drawn down, by an invisible force emanating from our Earth. Bouyed by the fruit’s anticarcinogens and glucose-regulating phytonutrients, he then proceeds to sketch the foundations of the theory of universal gravity, differential calculus, and classical mechanics, unwittingly kick-starting the Enlightenment.

We all know the legend, but is there any truth to it? Is Newton’s apple a handy metaphor for serendipitous innovation? Or is it rather, a trick, designed to draw attention away from Sir Isaac’s true inspiration? A source so cultish, so cripplingly obscure, no grade school science teacher would dare speak its name.

Sotheby’s, 1936. A secret hoard of unpublished Newtonian manuscripts are put to auction, and for the first time made available for serious study. The papers would give historians a glimpse into a Newton few knew existed—one obsessed with biblical prophecy,² occult magic, and alchemy.¹

Rendering of an alchemical laboratory by 17th century Flemish artist David Teniers.

This post assumes a basic, deep understanding of alchemical symbology, practice, and lore. But in case you’ve been living under a rock throughout the 13th – 17th centuries, we’ll start with a brief refresher:

First, you gotta know your metals. For alchemists, metal grows like a plant. It begins in its most impure form, lead, then progressively matures into tin, copper, iron, silver, and finally gold. Because solid metal kind of looks mercury when you melt it, a special type of mercury was thought to remain hidden in all metal.¹

If the alchemist could only distill this abstract, “philosophick” mercury, he could engineer a device that could effectively morph cheapo metal into serious bling. Armed with this contraption, the so-called “philosopher’s stone,” he could turn lead into gold.¹ What’s more, he (and it was pretty much just guys here) would have at his disposal the coolest, most awesomest, most indestructible self-improvement gadget in the history of the universe.³

Alchemical engravings transmit secret messages.

Think of it as the original get rich quick scheme, if getting rich also entailed getting smarter, living forever, curing all disease, and becoming just a really awesome all-around great person.⁴

But forging the stone was not a simple matter of following a recipe. Alchemists spoke in code. They hid their chemical reactions in elaborate symbolism and cryptic imagery designed to ferret out the unworthy.¹ Rather than baldly instruct initiates to mix two substances over a fire, the dickish alchemist would likely offer some mysterious allegory (i.e. “Let the red dragon devour the white eagle.”)⁵

Like all great alchemists, Newton went to outrageous lengths to obtain his own recipe for philosophick mercury. When the standard literature proved wanting, he began to seek out progressively more arcane texts.¹ Ancient myths became coded recipes to be tested in the laboratory.¹ Biblical scripture was viewed as evidence for alchemical processes.³ No source was too obscure, too ancient to potentially contain serious Da Vinci Code style shit.

It appears Sir Isaac was successful too, because in one manuscript we find this:

…I have in the fire manifold glasses with gold and this mercury. They grow in these glasses in the form of a tree, and by a continued circulation the trees are dissolved again with the work into a new mercury. I have such a vessel in the fire with gold thus dissolved, where the gold was visibly not dissolved through a corrosive into atoms, but extrinsically and intrinsically into a mercury as living and mobile as any mercury found in the world. For it makes gold begin to swell, to be swollen, and to putrefy, and to spring forth into sprouts and branches, changing colors daily, the appearances of which fascinate me every day. I recon this is a great secret in alchemy.¹

Is this nothing less than true philosophick mercury?! Blood of metals?! Most precious of all things?!! The detailed instructions that adorn the rest of the manuscript suggest it is.

Newton used raw antimony ore to draw in vivifying energies from space. These energies were then used to "actuate" regular mercury, turing it into the philosophick variety. In alchemy-speak, he let the greene lyon devour the sun.¹

Now all of this might sound perilously insane, but for a learned man of the 17th century an interest in alchemy wasn’t such a big deal.¹ A little outré, perhaps, but certainly nothing to be scoffed at (scoffing being the preferred method of registering disapproval at the time). For many 17th century Europeans, this stuff was totally legit. So it’d be hard to fault a guy for mixing mercury in his spare time.

Thing is, Newton wasn’t just some 17th century guy. He was Newton, forefather of the enlightenment, the first to gaze upon the world in its true form, free of ghosts, aethers, and occult influences. If his worldview was colored by his belief in alchemy, might the entire Newtonian worldview he engendered be tainted as well?

Wuzza?

The answer is, amazingly, yes! For Newton scholar Betty Jo Dobbs, who’s spent as much time investigating Sir Isaac’s occult researches as anyone, Newton’s theory of gravity exhibits markings of a decidedly alchemical genesis.³

At the very least, a theory as game-changing as gravity could never have come out of the prevailing mechanical philosophy of the day. Seventeenth century mechanical philosophers believed ordinary matter was fundamentally inert.¹ Any motion you saw was either caused by living creatures, or by God (by way of an immaterial aether set in motion at the dawn of time).¹ Lifeless matter didn’t do anything, and it certainly didn’t tug at other bits of lifeless matter across great distances.

To many, gravity’s suggestion, the idea that matter has its own intrisnic force that operates mysteriously across unfathomable voids, stank heavily of the occult.³ And they’d be forgiven for thinking so, since Newton never really explained how this attractive principle operates. Even today we have no friggin’ clue how gravity actually works.

So where then, did Newton get the ganas to pursue such an outlandish idea?

According to Dobbs, the answer lies in alchemy, not apples. While matter for the mechanists was nothing more than a soulless lump, alchemical “matter” is alive with spiritual energy.³ “All matter duly formed is,” in Newton’s words, “attended with signes of life”—a mystical essence which the alchemist seeks to harness for his own arcane purposes.³ Newton’s own recipe for philosophick mercury relies heavily on the action of such supernatural powers.¹ By drawing celestial influences from the cosmos, he is literally able to bring dead metal to life.¹

Hey guys hold up a sec?

For Dobbs, and many other historians as well, it seems almost certain that Newton applied his working knowledge of material spirituality to his budding theory of universal gravity.³ The notion of self-attracting bodies starts to make a lot more sense if we take for granted that all matter is infused with occult energy. Far from being a radical break in tradition, gravity, viewed in the context of Newton’s alchemy, is simply a rational explanation for perceived phenomena. If the philosopher’s stone can really turn lead into gold, who’s to say two rocks can’t exert a slight pull on one another?

Evangelical scientists? Robotic space probes?! This guy?!!

I hope now a more confusing picture of Newton’s apple is beginning to emerge. The tree of knowledge does not yield her truths willingly to the idle thinker. Her fruit is little more than a rosy ruse to draw you from the glorious secrets hidden at her roots—in the grimoires, tabulae, and cryptic alchemical footnotes Sir Isaac so eagerly devoured.

Perhaps if we’re to discern any truth in this myth, we must force it through the very same alchemical transformations to which Newton subjected his mercury. Only once it has putrified, purified, and imbibed the spirit of the cosmos will Newton’s apple reveal its true meaning. At this point, it will be very much like the philosopher’s stone—phoenix red and wise beyond any earthly measures of knowledge—a coded message from an unfathomable beyond.

This famous logo was inspired by Newton's apple, not by Alan Turing's suicide (via cyanide-laced apple) as some have suspected.

1. Dobbs, B. J. T. (1975). The foundations of Newton’s alchemy or “the hunting of the greene lyon.” New York, NY: Cambridge University Press.
2. Snobelen, S. D. (1999). Isaac Newton, heretic: the strategies of a Nicodemite. The British Journal for the History of Science, 32(4), 381-419.
3. Dobbs, B. J. T. (1991). The Janus faces of genius: The role of alchemy in Newton’s thought. New York, NY: Cambridge University Press.
4. Ragai, J. (1992). The philosopher’s stone: alchemy and chemistry. Alif: Journal of Comparative Poetics, 12, 58-77.
5. CENonline (2011). Alchemists Kept Lab Notebooks that Read Like Spellbooks [Video]. Retrieved Sept 17, 2011 from http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bDMw69uWRRc

The post Mad Scientist #9: Sir Isaac Newton appeared first on Mad Scientist Blog.

If you have access to some vials, semen, and significant quantities of human blood and putrefied horse manure, you may want to try Paracelsus’ recipe on your own time:

“Let the semen of a man putrefy by itself in a sealed cucurbite with the highest putrefaction of the venter equinus [horse manure] for forty days, or until it begins at last to live, move, and be agitated, which can easily be seen…If now, after this, it be everyday nourished and fed cautiously and prudently with [an] arcanum of human blood…it becomes, thenceforth, a true and living infant, having all the members of a child that is born from a woman, but much smaller.”¹

Did it work? Congrats! You just created a homunculus!

The idea that human life can be created artificially through strict adherence to magic and ritual is nothing new. The Greek myth of Pygmalion and the Golem narratives of Jewish legend are just two notable examples of a tale that’s been told over millennia. Paracelsus’ contribution, as an intermediary between medieval occultism and enlightened empiricism, was to translate this myth into the language of proto-science. By framing artificial genesis (hereafter termed “ectogenesis”) as a natural process, he transformed a supernatural story into a plausible hypothesis. In fact, when you consider the prevailing reproductive science of the day, this weird recipe doesn’t even seem that far-fetched.

Hartsoeker's sketch of his findings.

“Spermists” up until the end to the 18th century argued that children drew their essential features from the father.² The mother, it was thought, provided only a womb and the raw material.² Dutch physicist Nicolaas Hartsoeker’s 1694 “discovery” of pre-formed humanoid “animalcules” inside sperm cells lent credence to the theory.²

In this phallocentric view of inheritance, the male testes contain legions of swarming homunculi. If doctors could just simulate the conditions of the womb—say, by mixing shit and blood in a sealed glass cask—they should reasonably be able to extract life from nothing more than a glob of sperm.

To be sure, the idea of life arising purely through male ingenuity and substance smacks more than a little of chauvinism. But before everyone starts shouting that Paracelsus was just a big ol’ misogynist, I must note, for the purpose of making him look exceptionally weird, that his own relationship with semen was incredibly odd and complex.

He wrote fervently against masturbation. Cum that did not find its way into a woman’s womb, Paracelsus feared, could form monsters.¹ But he also opposed abstinence, claiming that sperm left inside the body would decay and spawn lumps.¹ The only recourse for the bachelor—castration.¹

“[His] complex of ideas concerning sexual pollution, unnatural generation, disease, and religious purification by castration,” notes science historian William Newman, “is, even by sixteenth-century standards, bizarre.”¹ The man was religious, but he was no ascetic.³ In fact, he seems to have been a pretty heavy drinker.³ Still, as far as anyone knows, he had no interest sex, and never let anyone see him naked.³ This has lead to speculation that Paracelsus was castrated at some point during his reportedly gruff, rural upbringing, or perhaps born a hermaphrodite.⁴ An analysis of Paracelsus’ skull, dug up in the 1930s, gave indications of congenital syphilis, but I digress.⁴

A rendering of Penfield's somatosensory homunculus

Modern science has rendered spermist preformationism obsolete, but the homunculus is still very much alive and—um—doing whatever gross thing it is that homunculi do.

In psychological circles, the concept has stretched into metaphor. Neurosurgeon Wilder Penfield used the term to denote a specific area in our brain that acts as a map of our own body. His “somatosensory homunculus” is now taught in most introductory psych classes. Cognitive psychologists talk of the “homunculus fallacy”—the erroneous assumption that your sensations are projected onto your mind like a movie, which logically necessitates the presence of a viewer, or homunculus, inside your brain.

In the lore of rare birth defects, the word homunculus may refer to a tumor that has mysteriously begun to display fetal characteristics.⁵

It is among hard-nosed reproductive biologists, however, that the enterprise of the homunculus has been most directly pursued. In the 1980s, when in-vitro fertilizations were beginning to demonstrate the viability of test tube embryos, Japanese scientist Yoshinori Kuwabara set about developing a fully functional test tube uterus.⁶ He excised more than 50 goat fetuses and brought them to term using a bio-regulated tank setup that pumped amniotic fluid through network of tubes and filters.⁶

Example of a homunculus found inside a woman's uterus. Note the fetiform structure, hair, and limb buds. Histological examination also uncovered a rudimentary skeletal structure, organ differentiation, and minute amounts of nervous tissue.

Dr. Helen Hung-Ching Liu of Cornell University has tested her artificial womb on human embryos. The results have been successful thus far, but are limited to a maximum length of 14 days under U.S. embryo law.⁷

Penn State feminist theorist Irina Aristarkhova cites what she terms an “ectogenetic desire” in scientific and academic circles.⁶ It is a desire that, she argues, “corresponds to and promises to realize the old philosophical desire for autogenesis/self-creation.”⁶

Yes, researchers may occasionally couch their studies in the language of health benefits and reproductive opportunities, but science, like sorcery, has its own ends. Much like the titular homunculus, wriggling in Paracelsus’ flask, the theory of ectogenesis has crept and nudged its way through centuries of obscurity and scientific dead ends, only to find itself at the vanguard of reproductive research.

Dammit Paracelsus! Quit being so interesting! I’m going to spend one more week talking about the strange relationship between Paracelsianism and psychoanalysis and then that’s it. (edit: ah never mind, let’s just move onto the next one.)

(note: most of the profiles I do won’t be this long and rambling)

Diagram of an artificial placenta system employed by Dr. Kuwabara.⁸

1. Ball, P. (2006). The Devil’s Doctor: Paracelsus and the World of Renaissance and Magic. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
2. Epigenesis and Preformationism. (2005). Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Retrieved December 31, 2010, from http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/fall2008/entries/epigenesis/
3. Pagel, W. (1982). Paracelsus: an Introduction to Philosophical Medicine in the Era of the Renaissance (2nd ed.). New York: Karger.
4. Bayon, H.P. (1941). Paracelsus: Personality, Doctrines and His Alleged Influence in the Reform of Medicine. Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine, 35(1), 69-76.
5. Weiss, J.R., Burgess, J.R., Kaplan, K.J. (2006). Fetiform Teratoma (Homunculus). Archives of Pathology & Laboratory Medicine, 130(10), 1552-1556.
6. Aristarkhova, I. (2005). Ectogenesis and Mother as Machine. Body & Society, 11(3), 43-59.
7. Eaton, S. (2005). The Medical Model of Reproduction: A Path to Artificial Wombs. New Antigone, 1, 28-37.
8. Kuwabara, Y. et al. (1989). Artificial Placenta: Long-Term Extrauterine Incubation of Isolated Goat Fetuses. Artificial Organs, 13(6), 527-531.

The post Mad Scientist #5: Paracelsus (pt. 2) – Paracelsus’ Homunculus appeared first on Mad Scientist Blog.

Every historian who wants to prove science emerged neatly as a reaction against medieval magic and mysticism, will at some point be faced with the paradox that is Paracelsus. One part proto-renaissance physician, one part medieval magus, this so-called “Luther of Medicine” harrowingly straddled the light and dark worlds of 16th century Europe. If single-handedly, he crossed the Rubicon into modern medicine, chemistry, toxicology, and psychiatry, he also bore the full force of their birth pangs. Scorned by the establishment in his own time, and obscured by history since, Paracelsus is never quite where you look for him. But root him out, and his rich hoard of alchemical treasures is yours for the taking. For science, as anyone who looks deep into Paracelsus’ eye will see, is at heart a form of magick!

The so-called "wound man" of medieval medical texts gives us a glimpse into the common pathologies of the day

So…um…anyways. Humorism! If you fell ill in medieval Europe your family might blame a vengeful God, but your friendly neighborhood doctor would almost certainly attribute it to a natural imbalance of bodily humors.

Blood, yellow bile, black bile, and phlegm, these were the four basic substances that had characterized Western medicine since the age of Hippocrates (~450 BC). Have a fever? It was probably caused by too much yellow bile. Leprosy? Too much black bile.² Do you suffer from a hernia, a bluish right elbow, and, in the course of your illness have developed a desire for wine? That’s a sure fire sign your humors are fucked.³ You’ll be lucky to last a week.³

Never mind that many of these diagnoses make no sense, and that the therapies offered—like bloodletting and trepanation (literally boring a hole in the skull)—do more harm than good. Medieval medicine had more in common with religious dogma than with controlled scientific experimentation. Arabian and Roman medical philosophers like Avicenna and Galen (the so-called “medical Pope of the Middle Ages”) were treated as godlike authorities.⁴ To question their gospel was tantamount to heresy.⁴

The physician was, in these days, a scholar. His medical secrets lay hidden in the fading tomes of high-mountain monastic libraries⁵. Brutish surgeries and dissections were left to menial orderlies⁶. Never would a doctor deign to cut into a dead body! As the picture below shows, doctors preferred to direct the proceedings from high upon their pedestal, textbook in hand,⁶ pointy finger at the ready.

Portrait of a medieval dissection or "post-mortem"

Paracelsus didn’t cotton to this ivory cloister elitism. In fact, he would spend the better part of his life loudly and crazily raging against the medieval medical establishment.

Case in point: his brief stint as a professor of medicine at the Swiss University of Basel. In his very first lecture no less, directed at “the Ignorance, the Avarice and the Strutting Vanity of the Doctors of Basel,” Paracelsus startled everyone by damning the entire history of western medicine, setting fire to a volume of Roman medical literature, and declaring that he would be their new king.⁷

“Would the Astronomer put away his divining, the philosopher his unreasonableness and the logician his lies, ye may yet find some ground in medicine,” Paracelsus wrote, reflecting the paltry esteem in which he held his peers.⁹

Paracelsus angry

For him, the “reason” and “logic” of medieval medicine were dangerous tools that obscured reality.⁹ A true doctor gained wisdom through experience and “experiments, which are the greatest masters of everything.”¹

He was among the first to experiment with inorganic chemical medicines.¹⁰ Armed with an advanced knowledge of alchemy, Paracelsus fashioned new cures from minerals, metals, and salts.¹⁰ In fact laudanum, an opium tincture first developed by Paracelsus, is prescribed today under the same name.¹¹

Still, his fellow faculty members at Basel were none too impressed. And neither for that matter, were his students, who found him “demanding, unpredictable and often frightening.”⁸ A mere 10 months after Paracelsus took up his post, after he published an inflammatory manifesto deriding the local medical establishment, steadfastly refused to lecture in Latin, failed to provide his university credentials, publicly insulted a judge, and following accusations of malpractice by town apothecaries, and charges of gross drunken incompetence by his Basel medical colleagues, Paracelsus skipped town in the middle of the night for fear of poison.⁸

“The universities do not teach all things,” Paracelsus wrote, “so a doctor must seek out old wives, gypsies, sorcerers, wandering tribes, old robbers…and take lessons from them.”¹²

Much of the “experience” the man so mightily prized came out of aimless wanderings along the fringe. Trading secrets with Mongol shamans in Russia, gleaning “magical instructions” from physicians in Alexandria, pilfering hidden treasures in the High Arctic⁸—what would melt a lesser man’s brain down useless goo, Paracelsus forged into an entirely new kind of medicine, based on curiosity and experience.

Paracelsianism, as his system came to be called, took the doctor out of the library and threw him into the real world with such force the reverberations are still being felt. His unbounded thirst for knowledge and his hatred for stultifying theoretical dogma set thinkers on the path to modern science.

It also, more subtly, opened the door to new breed of mad scientist, driven not by logic, but by sheer, unbridled faith in the absurd. So much of what is mad about science in the past 500 years grew out of the mind of this old fool. I would argue he could accurately be thought of as the Galileo of our small sect.

Over the next couple weeks, we’ll look at some of Paracelsus’ strangest ideas and examine how they helped shape the course of mad science over centuries.

Illustration of a Salamander from one of Paracelsus' works

1. Klawans, H.L. (1982). Medicine of History: From Paracelsus to Freud. Raven Press.
2. Demaitre, L. (1975). Theory and Practice in Medical Education at the University of Montpellier in the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Centuries. Journal of the History of Medicine, 30(2), 103-123.
3. Smoller, A.L. (2000). Skin pathology and medical prognosis in medieval Europe: the secrets of Hippocrates. American Journal of Dermopathology, 22(6), 550-6.
4. Viale, G.L. (2003). Return to Galen. Neurosurgery, 53(1), 205-210.
5. Goodrich, J.T. (2004). History of spine surgery in the ancient and medieval worlds. Neurosurgical Focus, 16(1), E2.
6. Clodius, L. (1984). Paracelsus Theophrastus von Hohenheim (1493-1541) and plastic surgeons today. History of Plastic Surgery, 17, 57-63.
7. Davis, T.L. (1928). Boerhaave’s account of Paracelsus and Van Helmont. Journal of Chemical Education, 5(6), 671-681.
8. Ball, P. (2006). The Devil’s Doctor: Paracelsus and the World of Renaissance and Magic. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
9. Rattansi, P. and Pagel, W. (1964). Vesalius and Paracelsus. Medical History, 8(4), 309-326.
10. Borzelleca, J.F. (2000). Paracelsus: herald of modern toxicology. Toxicological Sciences, 53, 2-4.
11. Gravenstein, J.S. (1965). Paracelsus and his contributions to anesthesia. Anesthesiology, 26(6), 805-811.
12. Lund F.B. (1931). Paracelsus. Annals of Surgery, 94(4), 548-561.
13. Williams, G.S., Gunnoe, C.D., Jr. (2002) Paracelsian moments: science, medicine, & astrology in early modern Europe. Kirksville, MO: Truman State University Press.
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