The lectures which he delivered on Practical Medicine still remain, written in a confused mixture of German and barbarous Latin, and containing little or nothing except a farrago of empirical remedies, advanced with the greatest confidence. They have a much greater resemblance to a collection of quack advertisements than to the sober lectures of a professor in a university. In the month of November, 1526, he wrote to Christopher Clauser, a physician in Zurich, that as Hippocrates was the first physician among the Greeks, Avicenna among the Arabians, Galen among the Pergamenians, and Marsilius among the Italians, so he was beyond dispute the greatest physician among the Germans. Every country produces an illustrious physician, whose medicines are adapted to the climate in which he lived, but not suited to other countries. The remedies of Hippocrates were good to the Greeks, but not suitable to the Germans; thus it was necessary that an inspired physician should spring up in every country, and that he was the person destined to teach the Germans the art of curing all diseases.[145] [145] See the dedication to his treatise _De Gradibus et Compositionibus Receptorum et Naturalium_. Opera Paracelsi, vol. ii. p. 144. I always refer to the folio edition of Paracelsus’s works, in three volumes, published at Geneva in 1658, by M. de Tournes, which is the edition in my possession. Paracelsus began his professorial career by burning publicly, in his class-room, and in the presence of his pupils, the works of Galen and Avicenna, assuring his hearers that the strings of his shoes possessed more knowledge than those two celebrated physicians. All the universities united had not, he assured them, as much knowledge as was contained in his own beard, and the hairs upon his neck were better informed than all the writers that ever existed put together. To give the reader an idea of the arrogant absurdity of his pretensions, I shall translate a few sentences of the preface to his tract, entitled “Paragranum,” where he indulges in his usual strain of rodomontade: “Me, me you shall follow, you Avicenna, you Galen, you Rhazes, you Montagnana, you Mesue. I shall not follow you, but you shall follow me. You, I say, you inhabitants of Paris, you inhabitants of Montpelier, you Suevi, you Misnians, you inhabitants of Cologne, you inhabitants of Vienna; all you whom the Rhine and the Danube nourish, you who inhabit the islands of the sea; you also Italy, you Dalmatia, you Athens, you Greek, you Arabian, you Israelite--I shall not follow you, but you shall follow me. Nor shall any one lurk in the darkest and most remote corner whom the dogs shall not piss upon. I shall be the monarch, the monarchy shall be mine. If I administer, and I bind up your loins, is he with whom you are at present delighted a Cacophrastus? This ordure must be eaten by you.”