Chemical Lexicon

...[ignoran]ce, which he himself could neither [repress] nor wished to [overcome], shamefully begged from Oporinus, the assistant of Theophrastus Paracelsus, a certain Letter original: Epistolam. This refers to a famous and controversial letter written by Johannes Oporinus in 1555 which described Paracelsus’s private life in derogatory terms., which he later brought to light, so that—deliberately and by design—by spitefully twisting the words of that Letter and interpreting them unfavorably, he might defile the honor of that incomparable man. Yet there are more things in that Letter which 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 the physician Michael Toxites Michael Toxites (1514–1581) was a physician and poet who became a dedicated editor and defender of Paracelsus’s works., as they were sailing together from Basel to Strasbourg—acknowledged this with repentance, as Toxites himself testifies.

Even our own Fuller Thomas Fuller (1608–1661), an English historian and chaplain. In his work The Holy State and the Profane State, he included a biography of Paracelsus that repeated many of the negative rumors started by Oporinus., a man of prodigious memory but here forgetting himself, followed the same path and handed down these accounts without investigation. If he had consulted with the writers concerning Paracelsus, or with his books, and had looked around with even a brief glance at the mutual correspondences between Erasmus of Rotterdam The great humanist scholar Erasmus actually sought medical advice from Paracelsus in 1527, writing to him: "I recognize in your letter the true spirit of a physician."—who was (if I am not mistaken) his peer—and many other notable physicians of that same time, and Paracelsus, [he would have seen differently]. But the Epitaph of Para-