A Philosophical Path for Paracelsian Medicine: The Ideas, Intellectual Context, and Influence of Petrus Severinus (1540/2-1602) (review)

In 1571, Petrus Severinus published Idea medicinae philosophicae, a substantial defense of Paracelsian medicine. A friend of the astronomer Tycho Brahe, who shared his interest in Paracelsus, Severinus had just become a royal physician at the Danish court, a position he would hold until his death. The book came at an important moment. Paracelsus had railed against academic medicine as a conglomeration of corruptions—Aristotelian, Galenic, pagan, and Arabic. The true medicine, he argued, was Hermetic, chemical, Neo-Platonic, and Christian. He died with most of his writings unpublished. During the 1560s his followers produced editions of his works, while his unsystematized ideas clearly lay outside the mainstream of academic medicine. And then, suddenly, four major treatises appeared in rapid succession. Jacques Gohory's Theophrasti Paracelsi philosphicae et medicinae... compendium (1568) was a commentary on Paracelsus' De vita longa, while the other three argued that Paracelsian medicine could be reconciled with the best post-humanist Hippocratic medicine of the academy. These were Albert Wimpinaeus' De concordia Hippocraticorum et Paracelsistarum (1571), Guinter von Andernach's De medicina vereri et nova (1571), and the Idea. Of these, Jole Shackelford argues, Severinus' text was the most influential. Shackelford musters evidence for this assertion from contemporaries such as Daniel Sennert to modern scholars such as Walter Pagel, Allen Debus, and Hugh Trevor-Roper. For several decades, scholars of early modern medicine and natural philosophy have increasingly recognized the importance of Paracelsian ideas to these disciplines, and so it is surprising that A Philosophical Path for Paracelsian Medicine is the first full length study of Severinus' life and work. The book begins with a biography of Severinus and then proceeds to an exposition of the Idea. The last two sections account for half of the book. Reminiscent of the work of Allen Debus, they trace the influence of Severinian ideas well into the seventeenth century and examine commentaries on the Idea by Ambrosius Rhodesius and William Davidson.

Shackelford argues that Severinus' chief contribution to the development of Paracelsian thought was to forge from the master's chaotic writings a Neo-Platonic metaphysics built around the central notion of semina. Using the term differently from Galen or Fracastoro, Severinus argued that semina are the immaterial sources from which the physical world emanates. Similar to the Paracelsian archei, they guide the transition of spirit into matter. Shackelford maintains that, for Severinus and many of his followers, it was extremely important that this cosmology was Christian, and not simply Neo-Platonic. And so we find Severinus presenting questions of disease etiology as discussions of Manicheeism and the problem of evil: if diseases, like all other things in the world, depend on the semina, and if the semina proceed from God, then how could God be the author of these "bad seeds" (185–94)? Exactly when Severinus became a Paracelsan is not entirely clear, but it was more likely during his travels to Basel and through Germany than during his time as a medical student at Padua. Among the more interesting assertions of the book is that practical concerns, specifically, the young physician's discontent with traditional remedies beginning in the 1560s, helped to drive him to the Paracelsian camp (149, 112–20). Given the Idea's metaphysical and theoretical bent, there is some irony in the fact that the author might well have been motivated to write as much from his belief in the efficacy of chemical remedies as by his dissatisfaction with the metaphysics of Aristotle and Galen. Readers will also be engaged by Severinus' use of the Hippocratic writings, particularly On Ancient Medicine. For Severinus, Hippocrates believed in any number of chemical qualities beyond hot, cold, wet, and dry, and he diagnosed and treated diseases according to these qualities. The reduction of the qualities to four, and their association with the four humors in the works of Galen...