Paracelsus has been called the prince of quacks. He flourished in the beginning of the sixteenth century. In order to give himself dignity, he assumed the names of Philippus, Aureolus, Theophrastes, Paracelsus, Bombastes de Hohenheim. He discarded all the commonly-received doctrines and modes of practice, and pretended to have been searching after the truth for many years. He put forth a pompous proclamation of his travels and researches, and pretended to have made great acquisitions in medical science. The remedies which he used were mostly of the _heroic_ kind; and though he killed many by his rash practice, he stumbled on some great cures, (and what quack has not?). These were proclaimed in the most bombastic manner. The result was that his practice was immense in amount and extent. The magistrates of Basle engaged him, at a large salary, to fill the chair of medicine in their university. At his first lecture he burned the works of Galen and Avicenna, and asserted that there was more knowledge in his _cap_ than in the heads of all physicians, and that there was more experience in his _beard_ than in all the universities. “Greeks, Romans, French and Italians,” said he, “you Avicenna, you Galen, you Rhazes, you Mesne—you doctors of Paris, you of Montpelier, you of Swabia, you of Prussia, you of Cologne, you of Vienna—and all you throughout the countries that are washed by the Danube and the Rhine, and you who inhabit the islands of the sea, Athenian, Greek, Arab, and Jew: you shall follow and obey me: I am your king—_the monarchy of physic is mine_!” Though he did not long retain his professorship, and though he was grossly intemperate in the last years of his life, he maintained his reputation for extraordinary cures even to his death. Great and learned men were among his patients, and even the noted Erasmus consulted this arrant charlatan.[11]