(“Here lies Philippus Theophrastus, the famous Doctor of Medicine, who by his wonderful art cured the worst wounds, leprosy, gout, dropsy, and other diseases deemed incurable and to his honour, shared his possessions with the poor.”) Among the contemporaries of Paracelsus were Luther, Columbus, and Copernicus. Their names alone are sufficient to show how the long-suppressed energy of the human intellect was at that period bursting forth. These four men were perhaps the greatest emancipators of the human race from the chains of slavish obedience to authority in the past thousand years. Paracelsus was not, so far as is known, a Lutheran Protestant. But he could not help sympathising with his heroic countryman. “The enemies of Luther,” he wrote, “are to a great extent fanatics, knaves, bigots, and rogues. You call me a medical Luther, but you do not intend to honour me by giving me that name. The enemies of Luther are those whose kitchen prospects are interfered with by his reforms. I leave Luther to defend what he says, as I will defend what I say. That which you wish for Luther you wish for me; you wish us both to the fire.” There was, indeed, much in common between these two independent souls. Columbus landed in the Western world the year before Paracelsus was born. Luther burnt the Pope’s Bull at Wittenberg in 1520, and it was this action of his which at the time at least thrilled the German nation more than any other event in the history of the Reformation. It is evident that Paracelsus, in imitating the conduct of his famous contemporary, was only demonstrating his conviction that scientific, no less than religious, thought needed to free itself from the shackles of tyrannic tradition. HIS CHARACTER. Such details of the personality of Paracelsus as have come down to us were written by his enemies. Erastus, a theologian as well as a physician, who may have met Paracelsus, and who fiercely attacked his system, depreciates him on hearsay. But Operinus, a disciple who had such reverence for him that when Paracelsus left Basel, he accompanied him and was with him night and day for two years, wrote a letter about him after his death to which it is impossible not to attach great importance. In this letter Operinus expresses the most unbounded admiration of Paracelsus’s medical skill; of the certainty and promptitude of his cures; and especially of the “miracles” he performed in the treatment of malignant ulcers. But, adds Operinus, “I never discovered in him any piety or erudition.” He had never seen him pray. He was as contemptuous of Luther as he was of the Pope. Said no one had discovered the true meaning or got at the kernel of the Scriptures.