The Devil's Doctor: Paracelsus and the World of Renaissance Magic and Science (review)

Philip Theophrastus Bombast von Hohenheim, called Paracelsus, is an apparently irresistible subject of popular biography. No wonder, for his lifespan, 1493–1541, encompasses Renaissance, Reformation, religious war, the expansion of European trade, and colonization of the New World. His incessant wanderings, his lay preaching, his thorny prose, his difficult and contradictory personality, and the variety and complexity of his ideas make for a subject who has been treated by turns as dark and brooding, a wild-eyed mystic, a man born before his time, and a scientist avant la lettre.

No scholar has ever been able to provide a social and intellectual biography of Paracelsus in a single volume. Indeed, no one has even been able to produce a scholarly work that unifies Paracelsus's religious and medical thought and writings. The science writer Philip Ball, then, does an admirable job of this latest biography of Paracelsus, pulling together an intelligent and readable account of his subject that, while it relies heavily on previous biographies, also makes use of recent works in the history of chemistry, medicine, and science. Ball is to be admired for his ability to range broadly across Renaissance humanism, neo-Platonism, Reformation, Copernican astronomy, witchcraft, and Arabic alchemy, drawing them all into a seamless recounting of Paracelsus's wanderings, ideas, and controversies.

Ball's Paracelsus "did not do science" (p. 344), was a "glorious failure"—by the lights of his own aspirations (p. 367)—who nevertheless contributed to the progress of science, especially by way of iatrochemistry. Ball also regards Paracelsus as contributing to modern science by seeking naturalistic and materialist explanations for phenomena that were regarded by some of his contemporaries as occult, magical, or within the sphere of religion. Moreover, he sees Paracelsus as advancing the cause of those who ultimately sought "to wrest mankind's fate from the control of higher powers and place it in our own hands" (p. 295). But this should by no means convey the impression that Ball views science and religion as at war in Paracelsus's day. One of Ball's greatest services to the popular image of Paracelsus is to convey successfully just how intertwined the investigation of nature was with religion in the sixteenth century, above all for Paracelsus. Ball very effectively draws upon history of science of the last thirty years (particularly the work of Allen Debus), and it is gratifying to see this sophisticated account of the history of chemistry making its way into a more popular form.

Ball skillfully folds in an astounding host of fifteenth-, sixteenth-, and seventeenth century personages to his account, making Nicholas of Cusa, Andreas Karlstadt, Johann Weyer, and Andreas Libavius, among many others, come vividly alive, and making clear the important connections between them and Paracelsus, connections that have hitherto attracted only the attention of experts in the period. Ball's sketches of large-scale events such as the Reformation have a strong storyline and are quite compelling, although the pitfalls of such an approach can be seen, for example, in his overly Protestant account of the corruption of the Catholic Church prior to Luther's reforms. But it hardly matters, for if the general public buys and reads this book, they will come away with a more than serviceable account of the sixteenth century and a wonderful appreciation of the complicated business of the making of modern science. Scholars, on the other hand, will marvel at Ball's ability to portray the forest but will miss some of the individual trees that, in their research, they have come to know so pedantically well. I, for one, objected to the portrayal of Johann Joachim Becher as the last alchemist (and Ball's apparent quotation of Leibniz's letters from my book on Becher without attribution). But a scholar would truly be a pedant to cavil...