Chemical Lexicon

cured The OCR "raſſe" completes the Latin word curasse from the previous page, referring to the patients Paracelsus healed. those whom he himself could neither cure nor wished to; he shamefully begged for a Letter from Johannes Oporinus, the amanuensis A secretary or literary assistant; Oporinus (1507–1568) was a famous Basel printer who served Paracelsus but later wrote a disparaging account of his master’s private life. of Theophrastus Paracelsus, which he afterwards brought to light. He did this so that, deliberately and on purpose, by invidiously twisting the words of that Letter and interpreting them in a sinister way, he might defile the honor of that incomparable man.

Nevertheless, there are more things in that Letter that pertain to the praise of Theophrastus than to his blame; and those things which he censures there are to be understood far differently than either Oporinus or others have interpreted them. Indeed, Oporinus himself—while walking in a meadow by the Rhine with Michael Toxites, the Physician A German-born physician and poet (1514–1581) who became a major editor and defender of Paracelsus’s works., as they were sailing together from Basel to Strasbourg original: Argentoratum—acknowledged this with repentance, as Toxites himself testifies.

Even our own Fuller Thomas Fuller (1608–1661), an English churchman and historian who had written a skeptical account of Paracelsus in his book The Holy State and the Profane State (1642)., a man of prodigious memory but here forgetting himself, followed in the same path and handed down these stories without investigation. If he had consulted with those who wrote about Paracelsus, or with the man's own books, he would have perceived with a slight glance the mutual correspondence between Erasmus of Rotterdam The famous humanist scholar who sought medical advice from Paracelsus in 1527.—his peer, if I am not mistaken—and many other noteworthy physicians of that same time, and Paracelsus himself. But the Epitaph of Para-